


Satellite Mind

by stardropdream



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 18:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 36,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardropdream/pseuds/stardropdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Fuuma-centric fic, starting from his early childhood and up to current canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. See the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on LJ September 21, 2009. 
> 
> Soooo I had this planned since forever ago and now I've finally sat down to start writing it. I had this epic thing planned that I thought would fit in nicely with canon and then I reread Tsubasa and realized that some things didn't match up. So this is probably AU or at least semi-AU. It's basically just a big, epic character-study of how I perceive TRC!Fuuma's personality and character.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Your smile is your greatest weapon.”

  
“I don’t belong here.”  
  
Seishirou looked up from the book he was reading, glancing at the boy who’d spoken over the rims of his glasses, one eyebrow arching upwards in question.  
  
Fuuma met his gaze evenly, twitching slightly as his heart thundered against his chest. His hands wrinkled and he grasped at the overcoat his mother had bought for him. His elder brother removed his glasses and placed them precariously in his own coat pocket, and shut the book.  
  
He turned himself in his chair and looked at his brother squarely in the eyes, and the young four-year-old quivered.  
  
“Don’t belong where?” Seishirou asked, but didn’t sound as if he actually cared all that much. But this is how his brother often sounded—as if merely entertaining Fuuma, always smiling but never seeming to smile at him. “The library?”  
  
“No,” Fuuma admitted, instantly regretting opening his mouth. He bit his lower lip, chewing it between his small teeth and peering up at his brother with earnest eyes, warm and gentle and cloaked in fear at invoking his brother’s indifference, or, worse, anger. “I meant…”  
  
“Finish your sentences, little brother,” Seishirou said with a sigh, closing his eyes a moment and collecting his thoughts. “It’s unbecoming to just trail off like a simpleton. Mother won’t be pleased.”  
  
He didn’t belong in this world. He didn’t belong in this family. He didn’t belong in this time.  
  
“It’s a shame,” he remembered hearing one night, slumping against the wall of their small apartment in uptown, when he should have been asleep. “The boy was born without any magical power of his own. Considering his parents, you think he would turn out much like Seishirou had.”  
  
“It can’t be helped,” he heard his mother, Setsuka, a lithe, beautiful woman with a quiet but deadly demeanor, say to her visitor, “It seems that Seishirou got all the important things. It’s for the better, that way.”  
  
Fuuma sighed, drawing his legs to his chest and resting his chin on his bent knees, thinking this over. He had no magical power. He could remember the tests his mother and the fraternity had issued in order to try and squeeze any magical abilities out of him, but nothing had come forth. He was entirely human, a boring, defenseless, non-magical human.  
  
Seishirou was still watching him, waiting for Fuuma to finish his thoughts. Fuuma peered at him, propping his chin on one knee and curling his fingers together, gripping tightly until his knuckles turn white. He always felt this way around his brother—ten years older and worlds away. His heart was never still when in the presence of his brother.  
  
“I… don’t belong _here_ ,” Fuuma repeated, and hoped the weight of his words would impart some kind of gravity upon his brother.  
  
Seishirou, however, merely pulled his glasses back from his pocket and placed them back on his face, using one finger to push the wire frames up the bridge of his nose.  
  
“Then why don’t you leave?”  
  
Fuuma almost laughed, but restrained himself. His brother returned his attentions to his studies and Fuuma sat on the small stool near his feet, looking up at him and trying to the find the words to properly explain how he didn’t belong and why he could never, ever leave the Brotherhood.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Brother?”  
  
It was a few days later, and Fuuma and Seishirou found themselves in their apartment’s library again. Their home was uptown, and the bustling bodies down below in the streets came to the windows as only a distant din. Smoke curling from chimneys swirled past the foggy windows.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
He spoke in the way one does when entertaining a lesser being, but Fuuma was far too used to this. He was the second son, after all, and one who could provide nothing of worth to the Brotherhood. Fuuma spent his days in the apartment, watching the world outside and trying not to be underfoot.  
  
“Um…”  
  
“You’ve been oddly talkative lately,” Seishirou mused, not looking up from his book, his fingers scanning over the words passively. “It’s a rare day when I hear more than two words from you.”  
  
“Yeah…” Fuuma admitted, and bit back the cringe that threatened to shutter through his body.  
  
“So what is it that you want now?” Seishirou asked, resigned and barely paying attention as it is.  
  
Fuuma watched him for a long moment, eyes wide, before he looked down, expression crumbling.  
  
“It’s nothing.”  
  
Seishirou sighed, reached out a hand, and patted Fuuma on the top of his head. It was an empty gesture, as Seishirou didn’t look up from his book nor did he look terribly sympathetic. But Fuuma closed his eyes, leaned his head towards his brother, and imagined that maybe his brother loved him, deep down.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Oh, you’re in here,” Seishirou said, leaning against the door and peering at his brother. Fuuma looked up from the books he’d been reading, blinked once, then glanced at the clock. He’d been in the room all day, and it was past dinner at this point. As if set off by this sudden epiphany, his stomach growled angrily at having been neglected.  
  
“Yes,” Fuuma agreed after a long silence. He pressed a hand to his stomach, trying to quiet it down and wondering if, despite the distance between them, his brother could hear him. He flushed in shame.  
  
The world outside was dark and cruel. At night, he heard screams that jolted him awake faster than having to dodge his brother’s magic (in the rare times when Seishirou deigned to use him as target practice). Outside the open window, past the fluttering curtains, past the windows outlined in candlelight, past the gritty, dirty streets of his home, there was a place he belonged. He knew it. He spent his days in the library, learning about faraway places, reading about adventures others had taken and recorded: hot air balloons, ships, caravans. The pictures of the savages and grotesque, monstrous people theses explorers brought back seemed freer than he ever would be.  
  
 _So why don’t you leave?_ his brother had asked him.  
  
There was no leaving the Brotherhood. Even if he was not technically a member, he couldn’t escape this. There was nowhere that he could go.  
  
He turned a page in his book, traced the curve of one of his country’s colonies, tucked far away on the other side of the globe, with smart-faced savages staring out at him from the black and white photo, individuals tucked away into towering grass with paint scratched across their face and their chests bared and strong.  
  
He realized, dimly, that his brother was still watching him. He looked up and Seishirou had the expression he often adopted when he was amused. It was hard to tell what his brother felt. He was always smiling. His mother was always smiling. The Brotherhood was always smiling.  
  
His brother seemed to gather what Fuuma wasn’t saying, and offered, “You’re far too open.”  
  
“Huh?” Fuuma asked, jolting to sit up a bit straighter.  
  
Seishirou’s smile cracked at the edge, looked more amused than usual. “You reveal too much in your face.”  
  
Fuuma bit his lip. “Is that a bad thing, brother?”  
  
Seishirou laughed, but it lacked mirth and it lacked viciousness. It just was.  
  
“In this world, it’s a dangerous thing,” Seishirou finally relented. “It’d serve you well to be able to curb your expressions, Fuuma.”  
  
“I didn’t…”  
  
“You hadn’t realized how easily you can be read? Considering whom our mother is and who I am, it could prove to be very dangerous to have you be so revealing. You wouldn’t be able to lie or hide anything. You’d be afraid when questioned, you’d be smug when you got away with a lie, you’d be nervous when lying.” He crossed the room, moving to stand in front of the young child and firmly grasped Fuuma’s chin between his forefinger and thumb. He tilted Fuuma’s head back. Seishirou smirked. “Like right now. You’re confused and scared, aren’t you?”  
  
“That’s…”  
  
“And maybe a little angry,” Seishirou decided when Fuuma trailed off. “Because this isn’t what you want to hear. And because you will never really be one of us, will you?”  
  
“I don’t care if I’m a member of the fraternity,” Fuuma muttered and tried to look away from his brother, who didn’t release his grip on his chin nor pulled his eyes away from his younger brother.  
  
“You should care,” Seishirou replied, calm. He smiled sweetly at his brother, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes, and his touch was anything but gentle as he kept Fuuma firmly pinned to the chair he sat in, books scattered on the table of the faraway places Fuuma, in his heart, knew he would never see.  
  
“I don’t have any magic,” Fuuma said. “I’ll never be as strong as you. Mother talks about it at night when she doesn’t know I’m there. I know that in her eyes I’m not as good as you are, brother.”  
  
Seishirou sighed. “Who says that mother doesn’t know you’re there?”  
  
Fuuma cringed, clenched his eyes shut before his brother saw how that remark caused tears to spring to the corners of his eyes. He knew how his mother felt—Seishirou was the person she loved the most. There was no father, there was only Seishirou; his brother, his mentor, and the person he, more than anything else, wanted to be. He would never be as perfect as Seishirou, in his mother’s eyes.  
  
“So I don’t care that I can’t be of assistance to the Brotherhood,” Fuuma whispered and hated that his voice wobbled. “I know I’m never going to be as great as you.”  
  
When he opened his eyes again, only when he was sure that his tears wouldn’t spill over, Seishirou stared at him.  
  
“You’ll benefit from hiding these emotions,” Seishirou said, brushing one thumb over the corner of one of Fuuma’s eyes, where a sliver of liquid had escaped. “Smile, Fuuma. There’s nothing to be sad about.”  
  
And he smiled.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Your smile is your greatest weapon.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
Most nights, the apartment smelled like blood. His mother dripped crimson droplets from her billowing sleeves, from her long, bone-straight hair. Her lips, curved upwards into a smile. Her lips, the color of the blood smearing her hands. Her eyes, as sharp as the weapons hidden in the folds of her skirts.  
  
But she was always, always smiling. It never faltered. A perfect, pristine mask—tranquil and yet deadly. Fuuma spent many nights awake staring at the ceiling, and picturing the moment when his mother’s knife pierced another target, blood spraying across her face, and not once would her face flinch—a mask stained red, lips matching the heart that stopped beating in the victim’s chest.  
  
That was the Brotherhood.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Why are you dressed like that?” Fuuma asked one day, unable to suppress his curiosity. Seishirou looked over from where he was adjusting the collar of his clothing. He’d substituted the suit he normally wore with something akin to a priest’s outfit.  
  
Seishirou smiled and it looked almost as deadly as his mother’s. “The Brotherhood disguises their assassins, Fuuma.”  
  
“I know,” Fuuma protested. He hung onto his brother’s every word.  
  
“This is what we train for, ever since we were young,” Seishirou continued, adjusting his sleeves, then giving his brother a sidelong glance. “Well, most of us.”  
  
Fuuma looked away, flushing with shame.  
  
“But that…”  
  
“No one expects an assassin to be a priest, now do they?” Seishirou said cheerfully enough, the words dripping with warning, a warning that Fuuma could only detect after years of living in the same house as Seishirou and Setsuka.  
  
“But…”  
  
“Yes?” Seishirou asked patiently.  
  
“Isn’t that dishonest?”  
  
Seishirou just laughed.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
“You smile is your greatest weapon, and stealth is your greatest asset,” Seishirou told him.  
  
“That’s what they said… before. When they tried to see if I had magic,” Fuuma told his brother, looking up at his brother as the elder read over the lines in the old books that decorated the walls of their large library.  
  
“Well, you’re not bad at sneaking around, it’s true,” Seishirou mused, and ruffled Fuuma’s hair in another empty gesture that Fuuma silently clung to, tucked away into the corners of his heart, where he could later pretend that his family was normal, loving. His heart clenched. It wasn’t supposed to hurt as much as it did.  
  
“Thank you, brother,” Fuuma said quietly.  
  
“Hm,” Seishirou hummed. “It’d be much more benefiting if you actually had magic, though. As of now, you’re only a burden to the fraternity.”  
  
“I… know that.”  
  
“I’m looking for a way that you could possibly prove useful to us,” Seishirou continued on as if Fuuma had not spoken, “But so far it’s been nothing but dead ends.”  
  
“I’m sorry…”  
  
“Apologies are signs of weakness, Fuuma.”  
  
“R-right…”  
  
“Perhaps you could prove useful. You’re small and don’t make a lot of noise.” Seishirou flipped through a few pages, leafing through the archives of the Brotherhood, encrypted and archaic in its language and presentation, as a manner of protecting the Fraternity’s secrets.  
  
“But I show my emotions too easily,” Fuuma said.  
  
“You can be taught to hide them,” Seishirou said dismissively.  
  
Fuuma squirmed. He wanted to be useful to his brother, but imagining his mother and his brother killing and smiling while doing so was one thing—seeing it happen would be another thing entirely. He wasn’t sure of the inner workings of the Fraternity, or why they killed the people they did—but it didn’t settle well with the young child.  
  
He sat on his hands, then shifted again and gripped his hands together in his lap. He glanced up at his brother through the fringe of his hair and swallowed thickly. On the other level, he wanted his brother to accept him, to need him for something. To want him, even if only a moment.  
  
“I could… learn magic, too.”  
  
“You can’t,” Seishirou said without missing a beat. “You must have some inherent inclination towards magic use, and then you are taught it at a young age. Whatever magic you learn would be trivial and of no use. It’d most likely give you away, frankly.” He paused and turned another page. “Especially since magic isn’t supposed to exist in this world.”  
  
“It isn’t?”  
  
Seishirou angled him with a look, slightly amused but mostly condescending. Fuuma was used to such a look.  
  
“Magic used to flow through this world, part of this earth,” Seishirou said quietly. “But this place has become too industrialized, striving towards modernity without any semblance of respect for what they are destroying. But this is how it goes. The streets now are covered in coal dust when they used to be humming with magic.”  
  
Fuuma listened with wide eyes, drinking in the information of times long past.  
  
“Amazing…”  
  
“Hm,” Seishirou hummed and it almost sounded like agreement. He glanced up, finally, from his book and shifted his attention towards Fuuma. Fuuma stiffened up, straightening his back as he looked up at his older brother, gripping his stool until his knuckles turned white.  
  
“Brother…?”  
  
“You’ll need a lot of training, to hide these emotions of yours,” Seishirou mused, thumbing along Fuuma’s cheekbones, staring into his eyes.  
  
Fuuma almost cringed. “Should I smile more…?”  
  
“Didn’t I say that a smile is your greatest weapon?”  
  
“But why?”  
  
“It’ll make you seem kinder for one thing,” Seishirou said, “when among people who do not know you. It’s important to be able to hide all things you feel. We prefer to smile, Fuuma, because the complete lack of expression only leaves many unanswered questions. You know that something is hidden. In most scenarios, no one can discern what’s behind what appears to be a genuine smile.”  
  
Fuuma shivered. “Brother’s smile… and mother’s… they scare me.”  
  
“Keep your fears to yourself, Fuuma. Conquer them, don’t admit them to anyone else. This will only make you vulnerable.”  
  
“It’s because even though you’re smiling… I know that you aren’t doing it out of kindness.”  
  
He looked up at his brother again, and Seishirou was smiling. There was a long silence, when he simply stared down at Fuuma, as if trying to convey something in his eyes. But Fuuma was unable to tell what it was, unable to work past the perfect mask his brother had spent years constructing.


	2. Covet the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seishirou finds a use for Fuuma, and the means to teach him about the world he's been born into.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to mention last chapter but I envision this world kind of like a bizarro Victorian England. Where everyone has Japanese names, apparently. My logic is faultless.

They walked the streets together, Seishirou moving swiftly and Fuuma stumbling to keep up with his longer strides, weaving between people, always smiling. Fuuma almost reached out to grab his brother’s shirtsleeve but managed to restrain himself, unsure how his brother would react to such a gesture. So he kept his hands at his side, in the pockets of his trousers as he attempted to catch up, even as his socks fell down his calves and his shoes got scuffed on the streets, stained with coal and ash.   
  
“Brother…” Fuuma began, once he’d caught up close enough that his brother would hear him. “Where are we going?”  
  
“To the cathedral,” Seishirou said dismissively, adjusting the collar of his priest outfit.   
  
“Ah?” Fuuma said in something akin to a vague huff or gasp.   
  
“Yes,” Seishirou said and did not elaborate on why. But this was Seishirou’s fashion and Fuuma really shouldn’t have expected otherwise. Fuuma stared at his feet, trotting alongside his brother.   
  
He’d been spending time in the library more often, reading up on things, but it seemed his brother had other plans for him. Setsuka was rarely in the house, with business of the assassination and political variety. Fuuma didn’t know the inner details, and didn’t really care to know, either, but it seemed that as of late his mother had become more and more involved with the Fraternity.   
  
“But why are you taking me?”  
  
“Why are you questioning?” Seishirou returned, voice jolly but still striking the familiar chord within Fuuma that told him that he should really shut up around then.   
  
He pursed his lips shut and swallowed thickly, ignoring the way his heart raced whenever his brother spoke with such a warning. To anyone else, it wouldn’t have sounded like anything terrible, just practiced neutrality. He envied his brother the ability to disguise himself so readily. But he’d always been that way, at least as long as Fuuma could remember.   
  
“… Sorry.”   
  
Seishirou didn’t say anything.   
  
Fuuma paused in his footing and nearly tripped over a beggar’s leg in his attempts to keep up with his brother. The beggar glared at him and Fuuma cringed inwardly, his mouth stumbling over another apology as he automatically reaching for his pocket to give him a coin.   
  
Seishirou grabbed his wrist and dragged him along. “Keep near me, Fuuma. It won’t do for you to be lost in this place.”   
  
Fuuma glanced over his shoulder, to see the beggar leaning back against the wall, looking as if he was about to fall asleep. Fuuma frowned, and looked back up at his brother.  
  
“… W-why are we going to the cathedral?”   
  
Seishirou smiled down at him. “So many questions today.”   
  
That meant he wouldn’t be getting an answer any time soon. Fuuma sighed, hand slack in his brother’s hold as he was half-pulled, half-dragged towards the cathedral at the other end of their desolate, barren city.   
  
“Why did we walk there?” Fuuma asked after a lengthy silence between the two brothers.   
  
“You need the exercise,” Seishirou said cheerfully, and Fuuma knew that wasn’t the true answer but accepted it. “You haven’t been out much.”  
  
“I guess,” he muttered to himself, glancing around the city. He couldn’t bear to be outside long, to see so much sadness and so much anger and so much disarray.   
  
The world he lived in was a wasteland within what was supposed to be a thriving culture. The women tightened their corsets and swooned into the waiting men’s arms, who grinned at nothing and flaunted their money and extravagance. Meanwhile, the beggars on the street would chip away at the ice on their toes as they tried to sell flowers and matchsticks. Weary-eyed children would stare at Fuuma and Seishirou greedily as they walked, their eyes hollow and haunted as they coveted the splendor their clothing hinted that they lived in. Fuuma could look out his window day by day and watch as the people around him starved or wasted away or killed in order to try to get by.  
  
He wondered if distant lands were like this—the lands to the east, the lands across the ocean, the lands to the savage south. He wanted to see it all, to leave this place. If anyone had asked Fuuma, he would have told them about how much he wanted to see those things, to leave the sad world he’d grown accustomed to.   
  
But no one ever asked.   
  
“Brother?” Fuuma asked. “Why…”  
  
“My, you’ve been asking a lot of questions lately,” Seishirou interrupted, dismissive. “How unlike you, Fuuma.”   
  
“… Yeah,” Fuuma admitted and fell silent for the rest of the swift walk.   
  
The cathedral rose in the distance, towering over the rundown buildings of the surrounding area. It pierced the sky, stained glass and stone visage both inviting and intimidating. Fuuma found that he was dragging his feet, felt as if something bad was on the horizon. They approached the large homage to God, and it seemed out of place in the neighborhood of this city. Fuuma swallowed, and hesitated as Seishirou started to mount the steps.   
  
He looked down at his brother and released his wrist. “Do what you want, but don’t leave the cathedral, alright?”  
  
“Yes, brother,” Fuuma said quietly and his brother turned his back on him and walked away, through the large, wooden doors and into the darkness within.   
  
Fuuma stood outside and looked up at the stained glass windows, seemingly so ordinary from the outside. His eyes traced the statues lining the stone balconies and ledges and alcoves. His knees shook and he wasn’t sure why he was so afraid, and so lonely.   
  
He rushed inside after his brother, the door slamming behind him in his haste.   
  
Inside the cathedral, it was dark and silent. He didn’t know where his brother had gone, and he couldn’t see far. The only light came from the small amounts of sunlight filtering through the clouds outside and through the dirty stained glass windows, casting cuticles of light the colors of pink, green, and blue. There were candles lining the pews, leading up to the altar. Fuuma stood in silence, hiding in the shadows for a long moment before taking a cautious step forward into the light of the circular window above his head.   
  
He’d never been in a cathedral before. He didn’t often leave the apartment.   
  
He looked up, trying to the see the ceiling, but there was only darkness and the distant coo of birds, hiding in the rafters and in the shadows.   
  
Fuuma shifted, and started walking towards the altar, keeping an eye out for his brother.   
  
He stood at the end of the aisle, in front of the pews, for a long time, focusing on the flickering of the candlelight, trying to match his breathing in time to the gentle hum that seemed to fill the air, despite the silence. It was almost as if someone was singing, though he was alone. He felt as if he could speak and have a conversation, and it would be normal.   
  
He lifted his hand and touched the altar, before quickly pulling his hand back. He cradled it against his chest, feeling as if he’d betrayed something sacred. The hum fell silent for a moment, hushed and holding its breath. Fuuma’s eyes flickered around, guilty, searching for the one who would point the finger at him and condemn him for all the things he’d done wrong.   
  
He couldn’t find his brother.   
  
Fuuma turned back towards the altar, frowning and looking stricken.   
  
“Oh!” a soft voice gasped in surprise and Fuuma looked over, realized that he hadn’t heard the footsteps approaching because he’d been too busy concentrating on the lights in the cathedral. A woman stood at the edge of the candles’ auras, toeing the thin boundary between shadows and light. “I hadn’t realized we had visitors. I hadn’t heard you.”  
  
“I was trying to be quiet,” Fuuma admitted, tilting his head to the side.  
  
The woman walked out of the shadow, brushing back her wavy hair and smiling kindly. “Welcome to the house of God, little one.”   
  
“… Yeah,” Fuuma said quietly, turning back away from her, watching the ceiling.   
  
“Is this your first time in here?”   
  
Fuuma nodded. The woman approached him, smiling kindly and Fuuma couldn’t tell if the smile was genuine or not, so he recoiled slightly. She noticed, and paused, standing a respectable distance away from him.   
  
“I’m a nun here,” she introduced herself, still smiling. “May I know your name?”   
  
“… Fuuma,” he relented after a moment’s hesitation, searching her warm eyes for some betrayal, some crack in that kind face. He couldn’t find one, and he wasn’t sure if it was kindness he saw like his mother’s “kindness”, or something different.  
  
“Are you alone?”   
  
Fuuma bit his lip, unsure what his brother’s intentions were but feeling it was best to keep silent for now. “For now. Brother will be back soon,” Fuuma said, keeping it vague. “He told me to wait in the cathedral.”   
  
“That’s good, I’d thought you were an orphan,” the nun said kindly. “They sometimes wander in here when they have nowhere else to turn. We care for them. It wouldn’t do for a young child like you to be alone in the world.”   
  
Fuuma looked up at her, studied her face for a moment and determined that, yes, she was genuinely kind. Her smile wasn’t like Mother’s. It was kinder, gentler. Real.   
  
_But I am alone in the world_ he wanted to say, but knew he wouldn’t.   
  
He swallowed and nodded. “I’m not alone.”   
  
“Karen,” a second voice called and the nun lifted her head, looking off into the shadows as a priest walked into the light, eyes studying Fuuma. “Who’s this young child here?”  
  
“A visitor. His name is Fuuma,” Karen announced, smiling and placing a comforting hand on Fuuma’s shoulder. Fuuma looked up at Karen, then shifted his gaze towards the man. “Fuuma, this is Father Kyougo. He’s the one in charge of this cathedral.”   
  
Kyougo nodded his head in greeting. “Hello, Fuuma. Welcome.”   
  
“… Hello,” Fuuma said, timid.   
  
Fuuma stayed for a few hours, mostly not saying anything and letting Karen give him a tour of the cathedral. He liked being near her, because she seemed to be the kindest person he’d ever met, and her smile put him at ease. Kyougo, too, seemed like a kind person, though he didn’t speak with him as much, simply because he was busy with internal church affairs (or so it seemed to Fuuma, who couldn’t really comprehend these things).   
  
When many hours passed and the sun was threateningly close to hugging the horizon, Fuuma began to wonder if perhaps his brother had forgotten him (it wouldn’t be the first time, and it wouldn’t be surprising if that were the case).   
  
But sure enough, the front door to the cathedral opened and Seishirou entered. Fuuma wasn’t sure where he’d been, or when he’d left the cathedral at all, but he could recognize the sound of his brother’s footsteps in the dim light. He turned his head around from where he was sitting silently at a pew, looking up at his brother.   
  
“You came to get me,” Fuuma said quietly, because this struck him as the appropriate thing to say after such a ‘reunion’.  
  
This seemed to be what Seishirou wanted to hear, for the sake of appearances, because he smiled widely and offered his hand. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Fuuma.”   
  
The sound of voices must have alerted the other two to a visitor, because shortly thereafter Karen and Kyougo appeared from their respective directions, the nun holding a candelabrum to help light her way and the priest emerging from the back room, lit only in shadows.  
  
“You must be Fuuma’s brother,” Karen greeted, smiling, once she was close enough for her to speak normally without threatening to rattle the cathedral with echoes. “Fuuma’s been waiting patiently for you. Welcome.”  
  
“Thank you for looking after my brother,” Seishirou said, and Fuuma figured that he must look charming and kind, even if he could see through that smile in a heartbeat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have come sooner, but the way things are now…”  
  
Seishirou trailed off and Fuuma recognized the technique—leave it vague for the others to fill in their own beliefs about the situation, hinting at something ominous or undesirable.   
  
It must have worked, because Kyougo gave the two brothers a sympathetic smile. “You are both always welcomed in this house of God.”   
  
Seishirou bowed his head, and to Fuuma he simply looked bored. “Thank you.”   
  
“I see you, too, are a man of the cloth,” Kyougo continued on and Fuuma just barely managed to restrain his cringe. His brother wasn’t actually a priest, he was just pretending to be one. It hurt to lie to these two people who had been so kind to him. The priest continued, “At such a young age?”   
  
“I’m only in training,” Seishirou said easily, lying as easily and effortlessly as taking a breath of air. He straightened out the collar of his outfit, one that was as genuine as his brother’s smiles, and said, “I do what I can, given the situation.”  
  
This, too, was a vague statement that Fuuma saw straight through. But the priest nodded his head in grave sympathy and Karen smiled down at Fuuma, as if feeling sorry for the young child. He hated knowing that he was lying to her.   
  
“Well, should the need ever arise,” Karen said gently, bending at the knees so she could look Fuuma straight in the eye. “Fuuma is always welcomed here.”  
  
Fuuma’s eyes widened in surprise. It took a long moment of his heart thundering in his chest before he managed to murmur, “T-thank you…”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“You seemed to enjoy yourself today,” Seishirou said absently as they walked down the street back towards their apartment. They were steadily moving away from the more desolate parts of town and more towards the upper class uptown. Fuuma wasn’t sure if he was happy to be in familiar territory, or sad to have to leave the cathedral.   
  
Fuuma looked up at his brother. “Were you watching?”  
  
Seishirou didn’t answer, and instead asked, “Did you like it there?”   
  
Fuuma looked down again. He wasn’t sure what his brother wanted to hear as the answer. He had liked it there. He’d liked feeling like someone was paying attention to him, like someone wanted to speak with him—and Sister Karen had said that he could return if he’d wanted to.   
  
He swallowed, and then shrugged. “It was okay.”   
  
“I’ll take you again sometime,” Seishirou said decisively.   
  
Fuuma glanced at his brother’s shoes as they walked. “Why?”   
  
“You seemed to like those two,” his brother mused, and Fuuma wasn’t sure if that was a change in topic or simply meant as an explanation for bringing Fuuma. The young boy couldn’t work out his brother’s motives—he never could and someday would learn not to try—and frowned.   
  
“… They were very kind,” Fuuma relented.  
  
“Be careful,” Seishirou told him.  
  
“E-eh?” Fuuma asked, eyes widening for the blink of an eye before he tried to force his expression back into a neutral impasse. It didn’t work and he could feel the way his face was twisted into an unnatural grimace.   
  
“Kindness in this world is all a lie,” his brother told him, speaking as nonchalantly as if he were merely discussing weather patterns to the young child. “No one is genuine.”  
  
“But they…”  
  
“A person is only kind when they are in need of something. If there is something that you can give them, they will work for it and once they’re done, they will discard you. Do not be tricked by kind people, Fuuma, because kind people are the cruelest.”   
  
Fuuma looked up at his brother and saw him smiling kindly down at him.   
  
He knew that his brother was right, in that moment.   
  
“Then…” Fuuma began, hesitant, afraid that he may overstep his boundaries with this next question but was unable to stop it: “What is it that you want from me, Brother?”   
  
Seishirou’s eyes glittered in the darkness and he smiled a low, sharp smile, as deadly as a razorblade. “All in good time,” Seishirou said with that smile. “You should talk to the priest more.”   
  
“Oh… okay,” Fuuma said quietly, taken aback by the sudden change in topic. His body shivered from his words.   
  
_Kind people are the cruelest._   
  
They reached home, and they moved up the rickety stares to the top floor apartment, their home. Setsuka was waiting for them when they returned, lying over a lounge chair passively staring up at the ceiling. She glanced up when her two sons entered, and she smiled warmly at the eldest, rising from the chair and gliding over to him, draping her arms over his shoulders and curling her fingers into his hair.  
  
“Welcome home,” she said sweetly, her eyes hooded as she gazed up at her eldest son, fingers stroking over the short black hair covering his head. “Were you successful?”  
  
“Just lying out the groundwork for now. But you don’t need to worry over it, Mother.”   
  
She seemed to like this answer because her eyes softened. She cooed out a sweet melody of words as she spoke with her son, shifting closer. Seishirou, smiling, obediently wrapped his arms around her hips and drew her close to him. Fuuma thought he seemed rather bored—he always seemed bored these days.   
  
Fuuma looked up at his mother, staying near his brother’s side even as his mother preoccupied herself with him. He traced her young, beautiful face and was reminded of Karen, and how kind the nun was.   
  
_Kind people are the cruelest._  
  
His mother’s fingers traced the line of Seishirou’s jaw before tipping his face and kissing his cheek.  
  
Fuuma closed his eyes, and wondered how it would feel to have someone like Karen as a mother.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“What is it that you wanted to talk about?” Father Kyougo asked him later that week, where his brother had left him to his own devises in the cathedral again. He remembered his brother’s instruction—disguised as a suggestion—to speak more with the priest. So here he was.   
  
Except he wasn’t sure what it was he should speak to him about. The man was kind, and listened—Fuuma figured that was required considering the job he had—but Fuuma found himself fumbling over his words whenever he was around him, and often left with a heart heavier than it had been before he spoke with the man.   
  
The man was patient through Fuuma’s silence. When it became clear that Fuuma really wasn’t sure what to say, the man’s eyes flickered. “Whatever it is you need to say, child, I will listen.”   
  
Fuuma looked up at him and realized that his long silence must have made the man believe that it was something bad that Fuuma wished to speak about. He bit the inside of his cheek, thinking over the priest’s words.   
  
“Um…” he began, then stopped.  
  
The priest nodded in encouragement.   
  
“Do bad people always go to hell?” Fuuma asked, looking away and up at the stained glass windows, depicting scenes from stories he’d never read. He felt a shiver run down his spine.   
  
Kyougo watched the boy silently a moment before sitting down beside him in the pew.   
  
“It depends on what you mean by bad.” The words were diplomatic. His voice seemed to echo through the cathedral and it made Fuuma wonder if his brother could hear—and the idea made his body tense up, both fearing and desiring his brother’s attention.   
  
“Doing things that aren’t good,” Fuuma said quietly. “Like lying and stealing and…” Fuuma glanced around, trailing off, and leaned in closer, his voice nothing more than a hushed whisper, “Killing.”   
  
The priest’s face shifted a moment but he didn’t say anything. He folded his hands together and pressed them against his face, as he studied the altar in thought. It looked as if he was praying.   
  
“There are some things that are unforgiveable. But some things you can repent for, if you truly want to start anew and accept God’s grace,” he said at last. Once again, it was a diplomatic answer.   
  
Fuuma pondered over this answer. “What if you can’t repent?”  
  
“You can always repent.”  
  
 _I can’t,_ he wanted to say. He couldn’t leave his family, even if he was not technically part of the Brotherhood. He couldn’t escape it.  
  
“Even if someone doesn’t do horrible things… if they know that someone else is doing something bad and they don’t say anything, is that bad?”   
  
Kyougo turned from the altar to study the boy’s face, frowning. Fuuma squirmed in his pew, realizing that he’d most likely said something he shouldn’t have, given away too much information. He tried to smooth his face out into neutrality, something he’d seen his brother do thousands of times before. His smile was too shaky.   
  
“Do you believe you will go to hell, child?” he asked and sounded as if this idea saddened him.   
  
Fuuma continued to squirm inwardly, and he sat down on his hands. He bit his lip, and nodded slightly, eyes wide, as if only just realizing that belief for the first time.   
  
Hell.   
  
Kyougo’s face dissolved into one of infinite sadness. He touched the top of the boy’s head, expression almost fond but mostly apologetic and sad. His eyebrows crinkled over his face, and it almost looked like a grimace. Fuuma wasn’t used to seeing a face like that—only when he looked in the mirror (and he oftentimes avoided the mirror)—and it left him frozen, staring up at the priest with widened eyes and his entire body shaking.   
  
“If there are things you cannot say, Fuuma, then I cannot give you the proper answer,” he said at last. “Even so… I don’t think you are destined for hell.”  
  
There was a hushed silence. Then, “I’m not?”   
  
“No,” breathed the man, and looked more and more heartbroken as the conversation continued on.   
  
Fuuma looked down, and felt a disbelieving laugh bubble out of his chest. His body hurt.   
  
“But…” he began.   
  
“You have compassion, Fuuma,” the priest said gently, smiling.   
  
Fuuma looked up at him in alarm.   
  
The man’s face twisted in confusion. “Why such a face?”  
  
“I’m not…” Fuuma began. He wasn’t supposed to have compassion.   
  
The priest, naturally, misunderstood Fuuma’s meaning. He smiled at him, keeping the hand on the child’s head and almost ruffling his hair affectionately. “You do have compassion. I’ve heard the way you’ve spoken with the nuns and visitors to this cathedral. I’ve seen the way you look upon people, disregarding whatever it is within yourself and wanting to help others.”  
  
 _You’re wrong,_ was all Fuuma could think.   
  
His face must have reflected it, because the priest asked, “Do you not believe me?”  
  
Fuuma clenched his eyes shut. “I don’t believe you.”   
  
“The hardest person to understand is our own self, isn’t it? Compassion is something people nowadays seem to lack. Don’t ever let go of that kindness, son.”   
  
Fuuma said nothing. The priest insisted.   
  
“Yes, you. To have compassion… It’s a dangerous thing to have, in this world we live in today,” he continued, looking upwards towards the stained glass window, rounded and filtering in rose-colored light, to dance across the tiled floor of the cathedral. “A dangerous thing, but something that shouldn’t be taken for granted.”  
  
“Is the world really so cruel, Father?” Fuuma asked, and his voice was hushed in the darkness of the cathedral. He tried to ignore the way his voice quavered over the word ‘father’.   
  
The man smiled gently, patting Fuuma on the head.   
  
“The world is not as it once was.”  
  
Fuuma paused, debated not saying anything, but then asked, “Do you ever feel like you don’t belong here?”   
  
“In the cathedral?”   
  
Fuuma shook his head. “No. _Here._ In this… place. Time.”   
  
Kyougo stared at him a moment, frowning. Fuuma looked back up at him, earnest, hoping for an answer. The priest considered this question a long while before lifting his hand and touching the top of Fuuma’s head. The touch was soft, warm, and Fuuma closed his eyes to try and hide the fact that it nearly broke his heart.   
  
“I don’t think I quite understand you, child.”   
  
Fuuma looked down, fiddled with his hands. “Ever since I could remember, I’ve felt like I’ve been… out of place. A-as if I wasn’t born in the right time. I read about all the amazing things that happened hundreds of years ago—lots of inventions and discovering new things, lost civilizations and new people. Everything seemed nicer, back then. Or in other places. But instead I’m stuck here, and it’s always dark and scary in this city.”   
  
The priest stayed silent, listening to the young boy speak.   
  
“I think that… I’d be happier, if I was anywhere but here.”   
  
“You aren’t happy?”  
  
Fuuma bit his lip. He knew he was revealing too much—if his brother was watching, he’d be scolded later on. He swallowed, and nodded his head a bit hesitantly.   
  
“But surely your family…”  
  
Fuuma waited, but the priest did not continue. Fuuma laughed before he could stop himself, and was taken aback by how mirthless it sounded, in general. He’d never heard himself laugh like that before.   
  
“I think that… maybe deep down they care but...” And he wasn’t even sure if that was true, or just a delusion. He shook his head again. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happy with them.”   
  
“Fuuma…”   
  
“If I were to die, I know they wouldn’t miss me,” Fuuma said, and there was no sadness in his voice, just acceptance. He blinked once, then attempted the thing his mother, his brother, and those in the fraternity did: he smiled widely, closing his eyes.   
  
“Oh, Fuuma…” the priest said, with such infinite sadness that Fuuma was floored for a moment as he cupped the boy’s cheeks, staring at him. “My poor child.”  
  
Fuuma was quick to shake his head. “It’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t make me sad. It’s always been this way. Mother loves Seishirou the most. And we’re—” he cut off abruptly, knowing he couldn’t speak of the Brotherhood “—my family has been taught for years that we’re not supposed to show emotions or be attached.” He shrugged. “I’m not very good at it.”  
  
“How old are you?”  
  
“I’m five,” Fuuma said. He smiled again, flashing his teeth.   
  
“And you think that no one would care, if you died? And that you shouldn’t feel any emotions?”  
  
Fuuma shrugged.   
  
“But that’s…”  
  
Fuuma shook his head. “I wouldn’t be remembered. It’s okay. I’m not going to die, not for a long time. I spend most of my time reading, so it’s not like anything bad can happen to me.” Not like his brother, who was infinitely stronger and more amazing than he was, diving into assassinations and coming out untouched and unperturbed. His smile stretched across his face. “It’s fine.”   
  
“For a five year old to feel this way…” the father tilted his head back, looking up to the shadowed ceiling above his head. “God help us.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“You’re becoming quite close to that priest and nun,” Seishirou said a few days later as they walked away from the cathedral.  
  
Fuuma turned away from looking over his shoulder back at it and up to his brother. “I guess.”  
  
Seishirou almost looked sympathetic when he said, “Don’t do anything reckless. You’ll regret it.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
Fuuma followed his brother with a rag most days, trailing behind him and hiding away the sight of bloody footprints by mopping it up. Seishirou walked with the deliberate care of a murder, and it frightened Fuuma. Whenever he saw Fuuma cleaning, he never said anything other than that mother would enjoy seeing the way the blood seemed to accent the wooden floors.   
  
Fuuma would clean up faster, eyes wide with fear.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
“Is all murder bad?” Fuuma asked abruptly a few days later.   
  
Karen nearly dropped the candle she was holding, looking shocked a moment.   
  
Fuuma looked up at her.   
  
“… You often ask questions like these,” Karen said quietly, setting down the candle and moving to his side. She touched his shoulder. “Why?”  
  
Fuuma stared up at her a long moment before looking down. “I can’t tell you.”   
  
“Fuuma…” she whispered, before kneeling and cupping his cheeks. “I know you think you can’t trust anyone with your words… but Father Kyougo will keep them safe. Everything you say to him, if you were to confess, would be completely confidential.”   
  
“A-ah…” Fuuma stuttered, eyes wide at the proximity. Her smile was so kind.   
  
She brushed her fingers over the fringe of his hair. “It would be safe. You could say what you want to say, without having to dodge around your own questions.”   
  
“I can…?” he whispered.  
  
She nodded. “Yes. Shall we go see him now?”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Now, child,” the priest said from the other side of the screen, and Fuuma could still hear the sympathy and comfort, even when he couldn’t see the man himself. “I want you to tell me everything you think you need to.”  
  
“I’ve never done this before…” Fuuma admitted.   
  
“I know,” the older man reassured. “But it’s okay. This is very informal. Just tell me what you need to say. If you truly want to confess to me, then I will hear your words.”   
  
Fuuma sucked in a sharp breath, eyes wide with fear. “I don’t know if I should…”   
  
“Everything you say won’t leave this space, Fuuma. I will keep your secrets.”  
  
Fuuma tried to look through the screen, to meet his eyes and try to determine if he was lying. He swallowed the thick, painful lump in his throat and realized he was shaking. From fear or anticipation or both, Fuuma wasn’t sure.   
  
“I-it… it isn’t easy.”  
  
“Take your time.”   
  
Fuuma tried to breathe.   
  
“I-I’m…” he began, paused, and tried to stop shaking. “I’m…”  
  
And then it came out in a wave—Fuuma told him everything, about the Fraternity: being born into a brotherhood of assassins trained from a young age to kill all those who stand in the way of security, using magic and disguises, walking among society nonchalantly, disguised as doctors, lawyers, teachers, priests, merchants. He talked about his second son status, born without magic and without worth to his mother, who favored and loved his brother more than anything in the world.   
  
“Brother was trained from a young age, with Mother helping him. I stayed behind, to watch the apartment,” Fuuma whispered in hurried gasps of air, as if afraid that the priest would stop him and make him fall silent, perhaps forever. But the priest stayed silent on the other side of the screen, listening to his words. Emboldened, Fuuma continued, “I wanted to be strong like brother for a long time but I don’t have any magic, or any skills. I’m just good at hiding, and being quiet… I can’t do anything else. I’m just a burden to my family.” He choked on the words when he said them, as if only realizing it for the first time. “E-even now, I can’t hide how I feel. That’s the first thing I’m supposed to be able to do, t-to just smile as if everything is okay, no matter what. B-because my smile is my greatest weapon…”   
  
“Hide your emotions, Fuuma?” the priest asked quietly when Fuuma fell silent for air.   
  
Fuuma nodded, despite knowing that Kyougo could not see it. “We’re not supposed to feel anything. We’re supposed to be disconnected from all feeling. B-but I… y-you said it yourself. That I have compassion. I’m too honest with my emotions and feelings—Brother tells me all the time! My smile is too painful to look at.” The tears were collecting at the corners of his eyes. “But it’s not _supposed_ to be!”   
  
“This Fraternity you speak of…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“How large is it?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Fuuma admitted. “I don’t even know who the leader is. I know that Mother is very important. But I don’t know who is in it, how many there are, and how m-many people they’ve killed.” Fuuma fell silent for a moment. “I’m not even supposed to know all this… but I listen at night, because our walls are thin. But nobody knows any of those things, either, not just me. Because it’s to make s-sure that… no one betrays the fraternity.”  
  
 _Just like I’m doing,_ a little voice said in the back of Fuuma’s head and this time Fuuma did break down and cry, covering his face with his hands and sobbing until his small shoulders began to shake and his lungs heaved for bites of air. And the world seemed too bitter, too cruel, too horrible… and yet he was somehow not good enough for it. He _was_ betraying his family, wasn’t he?   
  
Even if they didn’t love him…  
  
“Why are you crying, Fuuma?”  
  
“B-because I’m…”   
  
The priest was silent. Fuuma couldn’t tell if he was angry or simply listening—if he, too, was disgusted with him, just as the Fraternity would be if they should ever learn about this.  
  
And it was with a cold dread that Fuuma remembered that he didn’t know where Seishirou was.   
  
“If I could say something, Fuuma…”  
  
“Y-yes…?”   
  
“Despite all this… that you have lived through, you want your family’s acceptance.”   
  
“I… well…”   
  
“You place your brother on a pedestal, despite how you feel he is cold towards you. You want to be like him, strong like him, of use to him. You want someone to see the value in you.”   
  
Fuuma hiccupped, trying to swallow his sobs.   
  
“Even if it means doing things you don’t think are right.” The priest paused, then continued, “You say that it’s okay if you were to die or disappear, that no one would miss you. But you _want_ someone to miss you and remember you.”  
  
“That’s…”  
  
“That’s _natural._ Everyone wants to be loved and needed by someone, Fuuma. This doesn’t make you weak. Having emotions and wishes… this doesn’t make you weak.”   
  
Fuuma was crying again.  
  
“Everything they do… it scares me,” he whispers.   
  
“It’s a dangerous, evil thing they’re doing,” the priest murmured back.   
  
Fuuma shook his head rapidly. “They say it’s to protect the Fraternity, and to protect people who are important from o-other people who do bad things.”  
  
“No one person has the right to take the life of another,” Kyougo whispered softly.   
  
“O-oh…”  
  
There was a long silence. Fuuma sniffled and sobbed silently in his half of the confessional chamber, head bowed in shame and not feeling any less forgiven or any less lightened by laying his sins and his secrets on the table.   
  
“For a five year old child to have these burdens…” the man on the other side of the screen said softly to himself. “It’s heartbreaking.”   
  
“I’m nobody,” Fuuma protested. “S-so…”  
  
“Who taught you to think like that?”  
  
“M-myself…”   
  
“Oh, child…”  
  
They sat in silence again, the priest ruminating over all the information suddenly dumped on him, and Fuuma regretting it more and more as the minutes ticked on. His eyes were wide, frightened, and overflowing with tears. He wondered if his brother had heard everything.   
  
“Is this all you can say for now?”  
  
Fuuma nodded, and then realized he couldn’t see that. He swallowed. “Y-yes…”   
  
There was a heavy sigh and the side of the confessional opened and light filled in from the other side of the screen. Father Kyougo stepped out and stood in silence a moment before saying, quietly, “I’ll fetch you some water and a towel and we’ll discuss this further.”   
  
“A towel?”  
  
“To dry your eyes.”  
  
“O-oh…” Fuuma paused. “Thank you…”   
  
Father Kyougo walked away, and his footsteps echoed in the silence of the cathedral. Fuuma sat alone in the room for a long moment before the door practically ripped open and his brother was there, betraying nothing on his face as he slammed the door shut behind him, leaving the two alone in the room. Fuuma was about to shout in surprise, but Seishirou’s hand covered the boy’s mouth before he could.  
  
“You’re a fool,” Seishirou whispered. “I told you not to do anything you would later regret.”   
  
“B-brother…” Fuuma mumbled around Seishirou’s hand.   
  
“Do you even realize what you’ve done?”   
  
Fuuma wept.   
  
“Stop that,” Seishirou ordered and Fuuma tried to regain control over his emotions. “Didn’t I warn you not to do these kinds of things? It’d only hurt you in the end.”   
  
“I-I’m sorry…”  
  
“I need this priest to be distracted so I could collect information from his inner office, for my target.” He almost was throttling his brother, but was restraining himself. “I brought you here to distract him, not to betray our family’s secrets.”  
  
“H-he promised he’d keep it a secret…”  
  
“I cannot trust his word, I cannot trust anyone’s words,” Seishirou said quietly. “You know this as well as I do, Fuuma. Even if he never spoke of it, he would still have unspeakable power over us.”   
  
“I-I’m sorry… Brother…”   
  
“This cannot be allowed to stay like this…”   
  
“What do you mean?”   
  
Seishirou wasn’t looking at him. He’d gone silent, thinking. He wasn’t smiling. It was the first time that Fuuma realized that his brother was angry.   
  
“Brother,” Fuuma cried, tears streaming down his face. “Do you hate me?”  
  
“I don’t hate you,” Seishirou said softly.  
  
Fuuma wept. “O-oh… I’m glad…”  
  
“Are you?”  
  
Fuuma nodded.  
  
“Why?”   
  
“Because if you hated me… it’d be… I’d be sad.”  
  
“But hatred is not always a bad thing, Fuuma.”   
  
Fuuma looked up at that, confused.  
  
Seishirou continued. “If you hate someone, that means you’re feeling something for them, right? The worst thing in this world to feel is indifference. For no one to care at all.”  
  
Fuuma’s eyes widened, blurred with tears for half a second before they fell down his cheeks.  
  
“A-and brother…”  
  
“I don’t feel anything for you,” Seishirou confirmed with a nod. And then he smiled again.   
  
Fuuma’s heart broke and he shook his head. “I’m… but…” He started to cry again. “But why?”   
  
“It’s better this way,” Seishirou murmured. “Isn’t it better to think that no one cares? You’ll never have obligations for family ties, you’ll never be hurt if you don’t allow anyone close.”   
  
“B-but…”  
  
“If they die, you won’t care,” Seishirou said firmly. “Trust me, dear little brother.” He stroked the side of Fuuma’s face, and he didn’t look angry anymore, and he didn’t look happy, either. But he didn’t quite look ‘indifferent’, either. “It’s for your own good. If someone were to love you, you would be destroyed by it.”   
  
Fuuma was silent, eyes wide as Seishirou brushed away the tears from Fuuma’s cheeks, his expression almost fond.   
  
“If you hadn’t cared for that priest of yours, for example,” Seishirou continued after a thoughtful silence. “You wouldn’t cry more when he dies.”   
  
Fuuma’s eyes widened even further and the breath caught in his throat. “What—”  
  
“I was going to let him live, Fuuma, after I collected everything I needed,” Seishirou said, straightening. “But now I’m afraid he’ll have to die, and our family’s secrets with him.”  
  
“NO!” Fuuma shouted, and struggled against his brother’s hold. “Y-you can’t! He promised he wouldn’t say anything! He promised!”   
  
“That’s a chance I’m unwilling to take.”   
  
“No, brother…!”   
  
But Seishirou was opening the door again, summoning up his sword, and disappearing into the shadows. Fuuma stumbled out after him, tripping over his feet and looking around frantically for where his brother was lying in wait. He scrambled over himself, running down the aisle between the pews towards the altar, watching as Father Kyougo appeared from the side room, holding a glass of water and a towel. He spotted Fuuma and started making a beeline for him.  
  
“F-father!” Fuuma cried out, nearly tripping again. “F-father, you promise you won’t say anything, right? That you won’t tell anyone? Y-you have to promise that you won’t say anything ever!”  
  
“I promised you that I wouldn’t say a word, Fuuma,” Kyougo reassured, smiling. “What’s the matter? It’s alright, now, son. I’ll do my very best to help you.”  
  
Fuuma skidded to a halt in front of the priest, looking around wildly for his brother. Panting, eyes wide and scared and pupils dilated, he couldn’t see him in the shadows.   
  
“We have to—” Fuuma began but was quickly cut off as his brother dropped down from the shadows, hitting the ground without a sound behind the priest. Fuuma’s eyes widened.   
  
He was about to warn the priest, but his brother was too fast for him, and in the flickering candlelight, Seishirou palmed his sword, swiveled it through the air so it was pointed at Kyougo’s back, and dove forward. In the blink of an eye, the black sword had pierced through Kyougo’s back and through his chest.  
  
The priest gasped in shock, the glass of water and towel falling from his hand. The glass shattered on contact with the floor, scattering into millions of pieces, dancing through air with the shower of blood bursting from Kyougo’s chest and spraying the pews, the aisle, and across Fuuma’s face.   
  
The priest was dead instantly.   
  
Fuuma stared for half a moment, his eyes wide, before he screamed.


	3. Climb the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Seishirou gets a new mission.

  
The world came back into fuzzy unfocus, and a moment later his eyes flew open in shock. He gasped before he could stop himself, blinking up at the ceiling. He shifted, felt the heavy weight of blankets lying over his stationary form and then the world rushed back to him in startling clarity. He was in new clothes, and pressing his fingers against his face, he knew that the blood covering his face before had been carefully cleaned away. His brother sat at the foot of the bed, reading a book. When Fuuma shifted with a start, he looked up, marked his page, and closed the book. His fingers removed the glasses from the bridge of his nose and pocketed them.   
  
“You’re awake.”   
  
Fuuma stared at him, and knew that he wouldn’t be able to hide his expression even if he tried.  
  
Seishirou’s smile was light and he acted as if he were unaware of his brother’s revulsion. “You’ve been asleep for almost a whole day. I was beginning to wonder if you would wake up at all.”   
  
“Brother…” Fuuma started, but his voice cracked from emotion and from lack of use and he had to look away, cringing in shame and in disgust.  
  
“Are you angry with me, Fuuma?”  
  
Tears collected in Fuuma’s eyes. “W-why did he have to die? He couldn’t…”   
  
He couldn’t finish his word and he choked back the feeling of tears hammering against the back of his eyes. He clenched his eyes shut, felt his body shaking and the constriction on his throat making it even harder to breathe. His nostrils flared as he attempted to hide the pain beating against his chest, feeling as if someone was ripping his heart out of his chest one drop of blood at a time.   
  
“You act as if I killed him simply for sport,” Seishirou said calmly, peering over at his brother who curled away from the look, wrapping his arms around himself, burrowing beneath the blankets until his breath came thick, and he bit back his cries of agony by chewing on the wool.   
  
“Right, you did it to protect the Brotherhood,” Fuuma muttered, tears slipping down his cheeks.  
  
Seishirou watched the shaking bundle of blankets without much expression. “I wonder.”   
  
Fuuma peeked out from beneath the blankets, eyeing his brother in sheltered disbelief.   
  
“Do you realize what would have happened, if someone had learned what you’d done?” Seishirou asked evenly.  
  
“No one was going to find out!” Fuuma protested, and just managed to bite back his rage enough to make it look as if he were merely throwing a fit, and not actually yelling at his brother. “H-he promised! H-he wouldn’t have lied, he wouldn’t have—”  
  
Seishirou laughed. “Do you hate me now, Fuuma?”   
  
Fuuma shook again, gripping his hands around the fabric of the wool blanket as he nearly flung himself forward in his earnestness. He cried out, “Why did he have to die?”   
  
“You’re avoiding my question,” Seishirou said calmly.  
  
Fuuma couldn’t summon up the courage to tell his brother that he could never hate him. He couldn’t figure out what the right answer to his brother’s question was, whether he should say that he felt hatred for him, or nothingness. To love his brother would be the cardinal sin against everything his brother had taught him.   
  
And yet he couldn’t hate him, the only one who had ever paid attention to him.   
  
“W-why…?” Fuuma mumbled into his hands.   
  
Seishirou shifted. It was an empty gesture when his brother placed a heavy hand on the top of his head, ruffling his bed-mushed hair, but Fuuma appreciated it anyway, lifting up shaking hands to wrap around his brother’s wrist and keep him close, to keep that one semblance of affection close—  
  
He remembered the priest’s kind eyes, as he patted his head. He remembered the nun’s kind smile, as she took his hand in hers.   
  
“If the Brotherhood had found out of the secrets you’d given away, you would be dead now.”   
  
The words were so soft, almost affectionate, but it made Fuuma’s entire body freeze up. Eyes wide, he stared at his brother. He couldn’t make out a clear image, as the world around him blurred and fuzzed with his tears as they overflowed and spilled down. “B-but…”  
  
“They wouldn’t care about him promising to protect your secrets. They weren’t your secrets to give away,” Seishirou explained calmly. He stood and moved closer to Fuuma, sitting on the side of his bed and refusing to remove the hand pushing down on the top of his head.   
  
“You were protecting the Brotherhood’s secrets,” Fuuma wept, and tried to dismiss the all too familiar strings of pain gripping his chest.   
  
When he managed to blink enough times to collect a more focused picture of the world around him, he looked up at his brother. Seishirou didn’t say anything for a long moment, merely smiled down at him, thoughtful and almost tender. The hand on his head shifted, smoothing over his brother’s hair and patting gently against Fuuma’s tear-stained cheek.   
  
“I don’t care about the Brotherhood,” Seishirou told him after a lengthy pause.  
  
Fuuma jolted. “But, you’ve always been part of the—”  
  
“Being part of something doesn’t necessarily mean you feel an affinity for it, right? You hate this family, don’t you?” Seishirou asked and closed his eyes as he laughed at Fuuma’s stricken expression.   
  
“I… I’m…”   
  
“What did I tell you before, about finishing your sentences?”   
  
“I-it’s you… who doesn’t like me,” Fuuma whispered.   
  
“Be careful, little brother,” Seishirou warned. “You’re in danger of rejecting those you feel have rejected you.”   
  
Fuuma froze up.   
  
Seishirou laughed again, and the moment passed.   
  
“This is the life you were born into, Fuuma. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can move on and grow stronger because of it.”  
  
“Brother…?” Fuuma began, his voice still wavering from emotion.   
  
“You wanted that priest to be precious to you, didn’t you?” Seishirou asked, more rhetorically than anything else. They both knew the answer. “You told him more things than I’ve ever heard from you before.”   
  
“I’m…”  
  
“And what did he tell you?”  
  
“H-he…”   
  
“Told you that it wasn’t bad to be compassionate or sympathetic? He has empathy,” Seishirou continued, not minding Fuuma’s stumbling attempts at answering. He thought for a moment, then added, “Well. He _had_ it.”   
  
Fuuma cringed. And when he cried again this time it was a loud, empty sound. He cried without covering his face or ducking his head. It was a heavy, hollow sound, sounding far too broken to belong to a mere child. The sound echoed rhythmically but without accent. There was no progress in the sound, as it echoed off the walls, every hollow sob was exactly like the one before it.   
  
“You should stop crying,” Seishirou suggested. “It’s unbecoming.”  
  
This only made Fuuma cry harder.   
  
“He could have taught you many things,” Seishirou continued after a lengthy pause, once Fuuma’s sobs began to die away again.   
  
Puffy-faced, and red in the cheeks, Fuuma stared up at him. Anyone other than Seishirou would have had to look away from such a heartbreaking look.   
  
“But there’s something that I’ve been trying to teach you, little brother. I’ve been trying to teach it to you so that I wouldn’t have to _show_ you,” he said, leaning forward and cupping his brother’s face in a way that would have been gentle had it been anyone else. As it was, it was a painful reminder of how Karen would stroke back his hair away from his eyes, reminding him to be grateful for the life he had.   
  
“Teach me?” he sniffled.   
  
“Yes,” his brother said and didn’t answer what, exactly.   
  
Fuuma frowned at him, the tears in his eyes drying for the most part as curiosity seized his heart. He bent away from his brother’s hands, but his brother held firm, keeping him tethered to the spot, and staring up at him. His brother smiled at him, but the eyes were closely guarded and betrayed nothing.   
  
“It’s for your own good, you know.”   
  
Fuuma said nothing.   
  
Seishirou continued, “The sooner you accept that, the better. Compassion and sympathy are wasted on people like us. It’s important to guard your heart, to keep yourself detached. That way, these things don’t happen.”  
  
“… But isn’t it lonely?”   
  
“Isn’t it lonely to be without the people you love?” Seishirou shot back, calmly explaining, and all the while smiling that same, empty smile. “If there’s no one there, you’ll never know what it feels like, or notice. It’s for the better, Fuuma. Don’t let anyone close.”   
  
Fuuma looked down. “Is that how you feel, Brother?”  
  
There was a long silence and then his brother said, “The sooner we all learn these things, the better.”   
  
“Is that…”  
  
Seishirou touched the top of Fuuma’s head again, patting down his unruly hair. “It’s better if you don’t dwell on it, Fuuma.”   
  
“But…”  
  
“You’ll understand when you’re older,” Seishirou said with a sagely nod. “Now, shouldn’t you be thanking me for protecting you?”   
  
Fuuma froze, stiffened up. The memories from before rushed back to him, and he saw the petrified look on the priest’s face just before he died, wide, vacant eyes staring down at Fuuma. Fuuma remembered the feel of the blood as it splattered. He remembered the way his throat constricted just before he screamed. Was that truly protection?   
  
He was tied to this brotherhood. He knew this, in reality. In reality, he would have been killed for betraying the secrets of his family—his brother had protected him. But he’d killed someone, because of Fuuma’s own foolishness.   
  
_Compassion._   
  
Fuuma paused for a moment, before he smiled. And it was the mirror image of his brother’s smile. “Thank you, Brother.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
The news spread through the city, the massacre at the cathedral. The priest, slaughtered. The young boy who visited, missing. The nun, suspected to be the culprit.   
  
Fuuma was reported as missing, though without a family name known and with the features that looked just like anyone else in this city, he was quickly forgotten. To be safe, his mother kept him in the house. He spent his days in the library, reading books and reading the newspapers that his brother would bring for him.   
  
And he would always be smiling, just like his mother and just like his brother. He would glance at himself in the mirror sometimes, and see the way the smile cracked across his face, seemed not to fit properly. He always looked too sad. Too jaded.   
  
He learned to stop looking in the mirror as he learned to smooth the blemishes of his mask.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
The first night he couldn’t fall asleep, because every time he closed his eyes, he was haunted by the images of those eyes as the priest died.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
The second night, he bit into his blanket to keep from sobbing. When that failed to work, he covered the sounds of crying with the sounds of laughter.   
  
Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He sat up for hours, huddling into his blankets and laughing until his gut hurt, his eyes wide and tearless, his hands shaking as he laughed hysterically waiting for sleep to finally claim him.   
  
His mother and his brother didn’t come to check on him, but it was impossible that they didn’t hear him through the walls, laughing into the darkness and not stopping until he finally fell to sleep.   
  
And it was only a matter of time before he began to believe that laughter was not a means to cover his tears, and more of a genuine feeling bubbling in the pit of his stomach.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He stared at the ceiling and laughed. “This only happened because he was too kind. Too kind.”   
  
Fuuma stared in silence a moment before the laughter resurfaced, maniac and hysterical.  
  
He rolled over onto his side, closing his eyes and very pointedly ignoring the regret lodged in his heart. “He was stupid to think that it’d be okay.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
Soon, he asked his brother what became of the nun.  
  
“Why, do you want to see her?” Seishirou asked with a smile.  
  
Fuuma smiled up at his brother, wide and seemingly amused. “No.”   
  
Seishirou hummed softly in the back of his throat and chuckled. “They let her go. They wrote it off as a serial killer, since there have been a number of murders lately.”   
  
Fuuma recalled the late nights of laughter, following his brother’s footsteps and cleaning up the blood from the floorboards.   
  
“Oh. Okay.”   
  
Seishirou laughed.   
  
Fuuma kept smiling, even after his brother had left him alone again.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Have you found anything on the catacombs?” his brother asked as he moved into the library.   
  
Fuuma looked up. It’d been a few months since Seishirou had brought him to the cathedral, and it seemed that the target that had brought him to the cathedral in the first place had been acquired and dealt with. Now, a new assassination mission was underway—his brother, most days, had Fuuma leaf through their vast library in search of information. Fuuma was silently glad that he could prove to be at least a bit useful to his brother. And it meant he wouldn’t have to go out into the world, where everything was cruel and alien.   
  
“It’s how those modern times are,” his brother had told him one night, patting back his brother’s hair as Fuuma grinned up at him. “People have ‘choice’ now. And it’s theirs to have. Undoubtedly they’ll make bad choices and good choices. And with this choice, there comes reflection upon those choices.”  
  
It’s the reflection that’ll drive someone insane, his brother had told him at that time.   
  
Fuuma never looked in mirrors anymore.   
  
“A modern world,” his brother had told him, as if reciting an ancient prayer. “People are ‘independent’ now. They are liberated. But they are also alienated.”   
  
Fuuma’s fingers shook as he traced the lines in the book. His brother rounded the table where his younger brother sat and placed a hand on his shoulder, bending over to examine the notes the boy was writing down.   
  
Fuuma looked up from where he was copying notes and handed the scroll to his brother, setting down the fountain pen, thoughtfully. He smiled up at him.   
  
“That’s what I could find,” he told his brother as Seishirou scanned over his brother’s neat handwriting.   
  
He nodded as he read. “This is good.”   
  
There was a small jolt in his chest at the compliment, but he didn’t betray it on his face. He just kept smiling.   
  
“Alright,” Seishirou said as he rolled the piece of parchment up and slipped it into his pocket. “I’ll be off, then.”  
  
Fuuma nodded and watched him go.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Months passed.   
  
If anyone had asked him what he found so amusing about the nighttime, Fuuma would not have been able to answer them. If anyone had asked him why he spoke more to his books than he did to people, Fuuma would have been able to think up an answer he would not have said. If anyone had asked him what made him smile in that way, Fuuma would have lied.   
  
But no one asked.  
  
So Fuuma told no one.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
After a late night in the library, Fuuma exited to return to his room. He found his mother in the bay window, looking over the desolate wasteland of their city. Her hair spilled over her shoulder, shining in the evening moonlight. Her dress cascaded over the cushion and coiled at the ground, soaked with blood. Fuuma traced the puddle of blood with his eyes, and knew that she would find it beautiful. He would clean it up later.   
  
She spied him from the window, eyed him for a long moment without saying anything. His birthday had come and gone. He’d known his mother for six years, and knew nothing about her. His memories of her consisted of watching her with Seishirou, watching her bathed in blood, and watching her from a distance.   
  
She beckoned him forward.   
  
Fuuma obediently moved towards her.   
  
She cupped his face once he was close enough, and the sudden contact startled him. He recoiled slightly at the touch but she did not bat an eye. She held onto him and refused to let go. Her hands were warm, not from comfort but from the blood still streaking over her paled skin. She left red handprints on his face as she smiled down at him.  
  
“Fuuma,” she said, as if testing the name out for the first time.   
  
Fuuma looked up at her, and smiled. “Hello, Mother.”   
  
“You’re growing up so nicely, Fuuma,” his mother said softly as she stroked her son’s cheeks, smoothing her fingers over his hair. “Every day that passes you look more and more like your brother.”   
  
“A-ah…” Fuuma said and didn’t manage to hide the stutter fast enough. He closed his eyes as his mother smoothed her hands through his hair. He’d been longing for this kind of affection, this touch, for so long and now that he had it, it somehow felt empty. But he let her touch the face of a young Seishirou and felt nothing in his heart.  
  
That was what his brother had wanted, right? To feel nothing means never to be hurt…   
  
“So handsome,” his mother cooed and he opened his eyes again to look up at her. “You’ll be so handsome once you grow up.”   
  
He closed his eyes again, smiling. “Thank you, Mother.”   
  
When he looked up at her face lately, she seemed a bit sadder than usual. Sad, probably, wasn’t the right word. Her expression was always very thoughtful. She would spend many hours simply staring out the window, brushing her fingers through her hair and humming. It was in moments like this that Fuuma knew that he would never truly understand or know his mother.   
  
She pulled her hands away from his face and collected his hands, drawing him to the window bench. He let himself be dragged, sitting on the soft cushions and watching his mother watching the world beyond the window. She hummed quietly to herself, smiling serenely, one hand still firmly grasping one of Fuuma’s.   
  
“… Mother?” Fuuma asked after a prolonged silence, when her sweet music became too much for him to bear.   
  
“Yes?” she asked, quiet.   
  
He hesitated for half a second, unsure whether he should proceed.   
  
“Am I of any use to Brother? Even though I’m not in the Brotherhood?”   
  
Setsuka pulled her gaze away from the window and focused on her youngest son. She studied his face before, in the dying moonlight, it almost seemed as if her smile softened. “Well,” she said, “Why don’t you ask him?”  
  
“Brother never really answers my questions. He’ll answer with another question,” Fuuma said.   
  
“You do that, too,” she replied, “sometimes.”   
  
Fuuma nodded and didn’t say that it was because he wanted to be more like his brother. Instead, he studied the windowpane, chipped white paint. “Oh…” he said, then paused as he weighed his words. “Mother?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Do you not love anyone, either?” Fuuma asked.  
  
Setsuka eyed him a moment before laughing.   
  
Fuuma stared at her, unsure what to make of that reaction.  
  
“Goodness, you really do listen to every word your brother says,” she said, almost affectionately. Affection, only because he knew that she was thinking of Seishirou. She laughed softly, and it sounded almost distant. “You’ll grow up to be just like him, won’t you?”  
  
Fuuma almost cringed. Instead, he smiled, and tried the words on his tongue: “Who knows?”   
  
“Hmmm,” she hummed sweetly. She closed her eyes a moment. The words must have brought her pleasure, to hear her eldest son’s words in the same inflection.  
  
He sat in silence, wondering if she would not answer his question, if she would avoid it just like his brother did questions.   
  
After a long moment, she said, “There’s a story among our family.”  
  
“Huh?”   
  
“No matter what, we are all destined for one thing… To be killed by the one you love,” Setsuka said calmly.  
  
Fuuma blinked up at her in shock. “Huh?”   
  
“For generations, our family has died by the hand of the ones we love most,” Setsuka said again, looking back out the window again.   
  
“But Brother says that—”  
  
“There’s a soul mate for every being,” Setsuka cut him off sweetly, smiling without feeling. “Whether you realize it or not.”  
  
Fuuma bit back the words he was about to say, startled by her admission.   
  
“The person for whom you were born to love,” his mother said, and this time she sounded more fond than distant. He stared up at her face, tracing her features as if seeing them for the first time. She smoothed a hand over his hair and he knew that she was not thinking or seeing him. Her eyes glazed over as if recalling a distant memory. “Your grandfather died by his mistress’ hand. Your father was killed by my hand. And I…”  
  
He looked up at her in alarm, but she did not see.  
  
She chuckled. “Well. You’ll find out soon enough.”   
  
“Mother?”   
  
“I am not long for this world, Fuuma,” she continued, finally addressing him.   
  
“But…”   
  
She smoothed her fingers through his hair, curling and twisting, pulling almost painfully on the nape of neck. He cringed but didn’t pull away from his mother’s touch.   
  
“The only person I love will kill me, just like my father and mother before me.”   
  
Fuuma stared up at her, eyes wide.   
  
“But Brother says that… our family isn’t supposed to feel anything. We’re supposed to detach our hearts,” Fuuma protested. “If so, how can—”  
  
“No matter how much you protect yourself, there is one person who was born for the purpose of destroying those walls, Fuuma.”   
  
“I-I…” Fuuma stumbled, frowning.   
  
“We all have one,” she said with a tone of finality and Fuuma bit his bottom lip, watching his mother’s profile as she traced her finger along the windowpane, staring out into the fading moon as it set towards the sky, its usual white face stained a blood red on the horizon.   
  
_If this is the world were I’m to meet my soul mate,_ Fuuma can’t help but think, looking out the window towards the fading sky. _Then there is no one for me._  
  
He closed his eyes.  
  
 _And there is nothing behind the walls I’ve built. There’s nothing left…_   
  
He thought it before he could stop it, and then there the thought was. He was no one. There was no one for him, because he did not belong in this world. It was a feeling he’d had for years and years, since he could cognitively remember thinking. This was not the world he was meant to belong in. The people, the faces, the clothing, the places, everything. This wasn’t his and it never would be.  
  
The only things he had in this world were his dreams and his wishes. Things that would never be granted or be his to realize.   
  
He closed his eyes and wondered if maybe it would be his brother who would kill him.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He wasn’t sure why, but a few days later he awoke in the dead of night with a start. He stared up at the ceiling, trying to understand why he had such a foreboding feeling in the pit of his stomach. Shaking, he left his bed and padded down the hallways of his apartment, wandering for the vain hope of growing weary again and returning to his slumber.   
  
Instead, he heard voices.  
  
“So that’s why it must be done tonight,” he heard his mother said.  
  
“If that’s what you think is best,” his brother returned. “Are you certain?”  
  
“It’s the only way the Fraternity can ensure the safety of its secrets. It is the fate of all of us, isn’t it?”  
  
Fuuma peered around the corner, and watched his mother curl her arms around Seishirou’s neck, one hand stroking his cheek in the way she had to Fuuma days earlier. Seishirou held her but didn’t show anything beyond a smiling face. He captured their mother’s free hand and placed a kiss upon her bloody knuckles. They were both covered in blood, and Fuuma realized that they both must have completed jobs tonight.   
  
“Alright…”  
  
“I want the person I love the most to kill me,” Setsuka whispered and Fuuma’s eyes widened as he realized just what he was witnessing.   
  
He couldn’t move. He watched, eyes wide, as the room hummed with magic. Setsuka curved her back, arching, as she held on tight to her eldest son, lips parted into a small smile as she leaned up and kissed her son. Seishirou allowed this and the magic was almost deafening in the room—  
  
And as quickly as it had started, it was over, with his hand through her chest. She slumped against him and her blood spilled silently on the floor. There was a long silence.   
  
Seishirou retracted his hand and collected his mother in his arms, holding her close and carrying her with a gentle care Fuuma hadn’t really expected.   
  
He began moving and paused at the doorway opposite Fuuma. He tilted his head, glancing back over his shoulder and their eyes locked.   
  
Seishirou smiled and spoke in a voice that he’d never heard before, “Come here.”   
  
Fuuma obeyed, running to his brother’s side, staring up at his mother’s dead form.   
  
Seishirou said nothing, simply began walking until he reached their mother’s room. Fuuma moved behind his brother, hovered, and watched as Seishirou set her down onto the bed, peaceful, as if she were only sleeping. The blood stained the sheets red, blooming from her like a flower.   
  
His brother turned and knelt, touching his brother’s shoulders.   
  
“Why are you crying?”   
  
Fuuma blinked and watched as blood stained hands reached up to wipe at his cheeks. Fuuma clenched his eyes shut and felt the warmth of his mother’s blood spread across his face, as if a final goodbye—a kiss from his mother he’d never receive.   
  
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He hadn’t realized he’d been crying.   
  
“It was what she wanted.”  
  
“I know. But why?”  
  
“To protect the Brotherhood,” Seishirou said, indifferent and shrugging, despite being bathed in their mother’s blood. “It is the fate of all of us, Fuuma.”  
  
“She said that… before… she said that we are all going to die by the person we love. That we’re all destined for that.”  
  
Seishirou smiled and stood, glancing back at their mother and walking towards the exit of the room.  
  
“Then we should work hard not to love anything—maybe then we can live forever.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Fuuma couldn’t sleep that night. He stayed in his mother’s room, watching her form, studying her expression. She looked peaceful. Happy.   
  
“Why…?” he whispered. He should have seen it coming. He should have known this would have happened. Sitting there, he watched the small destruction befalling his family. He and his brother were alone now.   
  
His frown deepened as the hours progressed. And in the wan hours, murmured to himself, filled with regret, “I won’t let anyone do this to me. I won’t let anyone disarm my heart again.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Their mother was buried in a place that Fuuma didn’t know. They weren’t allowed to see what became of her body.   
  
They spent their days mostly in silence. Seishirou was the head of the household after their mother’s death, but he spent his days fulfilling assignments from the Brotherhood, and Fuuma spent his time in the library, looking up information for his brother.   
  
With their mother gone, Seishirou was coveted by the Brotherhood for the larger assassination plans—and he did them willfully, killing all that was required of him. No one suspected the young teenaged boy to be a top assassin, so he was able to slip through the city with no difficulty—and used the catacombs Fuuma mapped for him when he did.   
  
Fuuma grew up alone in that house, and it was okay. He told himself it was okay. He had time to read the newspapers and to read the books in the library (twice).   
  
The months passed and the blood on Seishirou’s clothes slowly seemed to disappear. When Fuuma questioned him about it, his brother merely shrugged and said he was working on a very important project, one that would require much groundwork before he could execute the plot.  
  
“This person has had his life targeted before,” Seishirou said as he poured over governmental documents he’d stolen earlier that day. He glanced at Fuuma over the rim of his glasses. “But somehow he hasn’t died. My mission is to figure out why, and figure out how to make sure he doesn’t survive this time.”   
  
“Sounds complicated,” Fuuma admitted.   
  
Seishirou smiled. “It’s only a matter of time.”  
  
Fuuma smiled back. “I guess that’s true.”   
  
“It’s rather a bother,” Seishirou continued, still smiling.   
  
“Is that so?”  
  
“It can’t be helped, though.”  
  
“I see.”   
  
Their conversations were nothing but empty words now.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
One night, Seishirou came home late.  
  
Fuuma stayed up late waiting for him, sitting on the window bench and staring at the front door. In his lap sat a copy of the notes he’d recorded for his brother on the head family his target was a member of. It was an ancient clan, one that had been around for as long as Fuuma’s family had been. (Almost like shadow clans, he’d thought as he bent over the scrolls and books he’d found at the back of the library.) He hoped the information would be helpful for his brother.   
  
Thoughts of helping him gather information flew out the window when the door suddenly opened and his brother slumped into the room, covered in blood.   
  
But it was different from before. All the nights his brother had returned covered in blood, it’d been the blood of his victim.   
  
This time, it was his brother’s own blood.  
  
“Brother!” Fuuma shouted, launching off the bench and hurrying over to him, nearly tripping in the process.   
  
Seishirou chuckled as he closed the door behind him and slumped against it, slowly sinking down to sit on the floor, leaning against the door.   
  
“First aid kit, Fuuma,” his brother instructed.  
  
Fuuma skidded to a halt before reaching his brother before nearly tripping over himself in his haste to spin around and run to the bathroom down the hall, where he flung open the hidden cabinet and collected the necessary supplies to help his brother’s wounds—he thought he’d never have to use the antiseptic in this house.   
  
“Brother, what happened?” Fuuma cried out as he returned to his brother’s side, the bandages and cotton swabs spilling from his arms as he sank down to his knees beside his older brother.   
  
Seishirou chuckled. “Why so surprised?”  
  
“I-I’ve never seen you get injured before,” Fuuma admitted, looking distressed. “No one can touch you.”   
  
“That may be true,” Seishirou laughed and started peeling off his clothing. Fuuma was there with cotton swabs with alcohol to clean the thick, clean cuts scraping across his brother’s skin. They looked like he’d been attacked by an animal. Claws.   
  
“Who could have hurt you so badly?” Fuuma cried. “No human is strong en—”  
  
“That’s just it,” Seishirou laughed, staring up at the ceiling and smiling. “They _aren’t_ human.”   
  
“H-huh?”   
  
“My target,” Seishirou told his brother, voice hushed. “He isn’t a human.”  
  
“He isn’t…?” Fuuma trailed off, brow furrowing. “But how can he not be a human? I did research, Brother, this person is part of an ancient family. They’ve been around for centuries, almost as long as the Brotherhood and—”  
  
“They’re vampires,” his brother calmly cut him off.  
  
Fuuma nearly dropped the bandage he was trying to wrap around his brother’s arm. “W-what?”   
  
“They’re an ancient clan of vampires. That’s why the family’s been around for centuries—because every member’s been alive for that long.” Seishirou chuckled, dryly. “They’re purebloods. They have to be.”   
  
“But vampires are myths…”  
  
“Are they?” Seishirou asked, and slanted his gaze down to his chest, ripped open by savage claws and bleeding sluggishly. “You said so yourself. No human can touch me.”   
  
Fuuma stared. He felt the horror grip his chest and—somewhere beneath it all—he knew that he was impressed. Impressed that someone could hurt his brother, who was perfect at everything he did, and not be dead because of it. That person would have to have been incredibly strong.   
  
“So your target did this to you?”  
  
“No,” Seishirou smirked. “Not my target. His brother.”   
  
“He has a brother?” Fuuma asked.  
  
“Twins,” Seishirou told him.   
  
Fuuma thought this over. “Brothers…”   
  
“See if you can look anything up on vampires, and if you come across anyone named Subaru or Kamui,” Seishirou told him. “I’ll look, too. It seems I’ve underestimated these two, but I won’t do it again.”   
  
He smiled, and it was cold as ice.  
  
Fuuma swallowed. “Which one is your target?”   
  
“Subaru. He’s the head of the clan,” Seishirou said softly. “But I was clumsy. I’ll have to kill Kamui as well.”  
  
“Kamui is the one who… did this to you?”   
  
“That’s right.”  
  
Fuuma studied the wounds as he wrapped the bandages around his brother’s torso. His eyes widened in thought. “Kamui must be very strong… to be able to hurt you and yet to live after it.”  
  
Seishirou laughed. “You act as if I’m the strongest.”  
  
Fuuma stared up at him. “Aren’t you?”  
  
“I’m no match for vampires,” Seishirou laughed. “I don’t know what all their abilities are, but it’s definitely stronger than a human’s. Subaru, though… he’s too kind.” He laughed again. “He’s the reason I’m still alive. If it hadn’t been for me, Kamui wouldn’t have stopped until I was dead.”  
  
 _Kamui…_ Fuuma thought, weighing the name. He frowned thoughtfully.   
  
“Such a serious expression.”  
  
Fuuma whipped his head up and then automatically smiled, a perfect mask.   
  
Seishirou chuckled. “You’re impressed, aren’t you?”  
  
“I’m not used to someone being able to fight against you,” Fuuma admitted.   
  
“Heh.”  
  
Fuuma and Seishirou sat in silence after that, as Fuuma cared for his brother’s wounds until his brother found enough strength to care for it himself. Fuuma scurried to the kitchen to fetch some water for him and when he returned, his brother was slipping his clothing back on, smiling benignly.   
  
Fuuma peered up at him. “So what happened?”  
  
“My, are you going to drill me for answers now?”   
  
Fuuma frowned. “I-if I’m going to look information up for you, I’ll need to know as much as possible, right?”  
  
Seishirou patted the top of his head. “Clever.”   
  
“Brother…” Fuuma began.  
  
Seishirou waved his hand dismissively. “In order to become close to that family, I had to ‘befriend’ Subaru. He was kind enough. Who expects a priest to do anything bad, after all?”   
  
Fuuma nodded and followed his brother as the elder trailed away from the door, towards the library. He grabbed one of the candles burning in the holders lining the hallway and moved swiftly towards the library. Once there, Seishirou wasted no time searching every aisle of the expansive library for anything that might provide even the most trivial of information on the vampire twins and their family.   
  
“But I slipped up,” Seishirou admitted and Fuuma was surprised by the confession, and how open his brother was being—he must really want the information, and Fuuma’s help.   
  
Despite the situation, Fuuma was happy he could help his brother.  
  
His brother recounted he story. Despite the debriefing, Fuuma could tell his brother was purposefully leaving things off and keeping information to himself. He’d befriended Subaru, but had messed up—he’d discovered their true identity. To protect his brother, Kamui had sprung.  
  
At that point in the story, Fuuma hung on every word. He wanted to know everything he possibly could about this “Kamui”, whoever he was. He sounded too strong, too amazing—and a pureblooded vampire, too.   
  
Deadly, and able to bring even his brother to his knees.   
  
Fuuma realized it was not fear he was harboring in his heart as he listened to his brother talk about Kamui, but, rather, admiration.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Fuuma spent weeks trying to find information for his brother, while his brother left to continue befriending the vampire twins. Kamui had meant to silence Seishirou, to prevent their secrets from being revealed. According to Seishirou, it was Subaru’s kindness that had spared him, claiming that so long as Seishirou kept silent, there would be no reason to hurt him.  
  
“That will be his downfall,” Seishirou mused, more to himself than to Fuuma, as he recounted information.   
  
Fuuma continually drilled his brother for information on Kamui—what he was like, what he’d said that day, if he’d fought against Seishirou again.   
  
Seishirou rarely answered more than a few questions before banishing Fuuma back to the library to continue his research.   
  
Fuuma pored over the books, trying to find even the tiniest nugget of information about vampires, and even possibly a mention of these mysterious twins.   
  
His brother would leave for days, and never come home. Fuuma would wait for him, because it was all he could do.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Alright,” Seishirou said as he tightened the cravat around Fuuma’s neck. Fuuma nearly choked. “Those two don’t know my true intentions, so it’ll be fine to do something like this.”  
  
“They don’t know that you’re…”   
  
“For all they know, I’m just a humble priest that found out their true nature,” Seishirou confirmed as he buttoned up Fuuma’s jacket for him. “It’s still a secret they need to protect, but so long as they think I’m not dangerous, it’ll be fine.”  
  
“Is that why we’re going to this party?” Fuuma blinked up at him.  
  
Seishirou chuckled. “Remember to smile, Fuuma.”  
  
Fuuma smiled.  
  
Seishirou continued, “It’s for social purposes. They’re a very important family, after all.”  
  
Fuuma nodded, still smiling. He’d spent the last couple of weeks collecting as much information on vampires and the family as he could—with little success. The family was practically anonymous, with no information and no mentions of anyone named Subaru or Kamui.  
  
 _Kamui…_ Fuuma thought, then looked up at his brother.  
  
“Are you certain they’ll come to the party?”  
  
“They may not,” Seishirou said with a shrug. “But someone from that clan will be. It’ll be good for collecting leads and information.”  
  
“Then why am I coming?”  
  
“Second pair of ears,” Seishirou dismissed. “And image purposes.”   
  
“Oh.”  
  
  
\---  
  
  
The party was boring. Fuuma hated parities, and no one was talking about anything important for his brother’s mission. Seishirou was mingling with the crowd and slipping into shadows when necessary, and Fuuma was left to his own devices, the only child at the party filled with ladies and gentlemen.   
  
Fuuma wanted to leave.   
  
He sat underneath the linen, counting the polished feet and twirling skirts of the partygoers, feeling increasingly out of place and lonely. He listened idly to the chitchat above, while sneaking out only occasionally to grab a devilled egg or a slice of apple, munching and licking his fingers free of remnants of food.   
  
He sighed, looking glumly down at his feet. He’d rather be back at the library, trying to find more information for his brother, then sitting here and being useless.   
  
His brother had said that the twins weren’t at the party—or at least, he hadn’t seen them. Fuuma wasn’t sure why he felt as depressed over this fact as he was. Disappointment was not something he was used to feeling.   
  
Over the din of people, he listened silently to the piano notes floating in the air. Someone was playing a song, and though usually Fuuma did not enjoy music, this one caused him to pause. It sounded old and ancient, nothing like the classical pieces he was used to hearing. It filtered through the room, like a long lost memory. He closed his eyes, listening to it. Is this what they used to play in ancient times, before people had a “choice”?   
  
He sat in silence, letting the music wash over him until the song abruptly ended and Fuuma was brought back to reality. There was scattered clapping throughout the room for a moment before it filled again with impossible noise and pompousness.   
  
Fuuma ate more food. He watched the feet trot by the food table for a long few minutes.   
  
“This is utterly ridiculous,” he heard one party patron balk, standing directly in front of where Fuuma was currently sitting. “You know how much I despise parties! This place is nothing but maddening.”  
  
“I know,” a second, far gentler voice soothed, standing beside the first pair of feet. “But it’s necessary, for appearances.”   
  
“I know,” scoffed the first. “But still.”   
  
“Well,” reasoned the first, diplomatically. “I think we’ve made enough of an appearance tonight to justify going home now.”  
  
“Good,” the first, angry voice growled, turning away with the second pair of feet following. His voice grew less aggressive, now that he’d been granted what he wanted. He said, “I hate being out in the open like this.”  
  
Fuuma chomped into a quail egg, only half-listening now when the second figure said softly enough that Fuuma almost didn’t hear: “I know, Kamui.”   
  
The reaction was instantaneous. Fuuma’s eyes flew open and he doubled over, hacking up the half-eaten quail egg. He rested one hand on the polished ground, coughing, while his second hand pounded roughly against his chest. Once he made it onto his feet, he dashed out from under the snack table, bustling around coat tails and gowns.   
  
“Kamui!” he shouted into the crowd, stumbling over his brother’s oversized pants (lacking a proper dress suit of his own), trying to shove through the crowd but wielding no real strength of his own. “Kamui! Kamui!”   
  
He looked around, trying to see if Kamui was there, despite not knowing what the man would look like. All he had were his childhood visions, of a fearful vampire beating his brother and making his brother bleed—something that the boy had always believed to be impossible. He kept shouting the name, searching for the shoes he’d seen before, pointed and polished, and searching the faces around him for someone to turn around and claim the name.   
  
“Kamui!” he shouted, searching for the one person who had ever made his brother bleed and lived to tell the tale. He searched for someone he’d never met, but respected so deeply. His search was desperate, and he ran until his lungs protested for air. Outside, on the balcony, he crashed into the railing, scanning the exit for someone—anyone. “Kamui!”   
  
No one answered. No one was there. He sank to his knees, failed in his mission to find the only person he’d ever truly wanted to meet.


	4. Reach the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fuuma is left behind.

The days passed like that: Fuuma researching for his brother, sometimes Seishirou joining him. But Seishirou spent most days attempting to complete his job, and spent the majority of his time wherever the twins were. Fuuma didn’t know the details, and he didn’t join his brother to meet the two, no matter how much he wanted to. Seishirou didn’t offer up the information, and the days he spent away from the apartment were mysterious. Fuuma knew better than to think that he belonged in that world. It seemed everything was going as it was supposed to, because whenever his brother did return home, he looked pleased with himself (as far as Fuuma could tell, with that smile). Fuuma buried himself in studying, hoping to be of some use to his brother.   
  
There was a period, though, in late autumn, just as the weather was threatening winter-like conditions, where his brother didn’t return home for weeks.   
  
Fuuma sat up at night wondering what became of his brother, and of his targets.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Weeks passed. Fuuma would spend his days reading or staring blankly out the window, betraying nothing in his eyes. He smiled at nothing.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Late one night, the door burst open and his brother walked into the room as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. Fuuma whipped his head up from where he was sitting on the window bench. He blinked once, and tilted his head to the side—  
  
His brother looked different.  
  
If asked, Fuuma wouldn’t have been able to say what it was, but there was something different about his brother as he moved through the room. Perhaps because it’d been over a month since he last saw his brother, or perhaps because something really had changed. His brother moved with the grace he always possessed, but he seemed lighter on his feet, and the smooth lines of his face almost made him seem younger. Perhaps it was only a trick of the light.   
  
“Brother?” Fuuma asked as he approached him.   
  
Seishirou shifted his gaze, as if only just then noticing Fuuma. “So you are still here.”   
  
“Oh,” Fuuma said, remembering. “Welcome home.”   
  
He smiled, enigmatic. “Thank you.”   
  
Fuuma approached him. “Did something happen?”   
  
Seishirou studied the world around him a moment, smiling still, before shrugging one shoulder and walking towards his bedroom. “Who knows?”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“They’ve left.”   
  
Fuuma looked up, blinking in surprise at the sudden declaration. He tilted his head to the side. “Brother?”   
  
His brother’s smile shifted a bit, less enigmatic now but no less unreadable. “I can’t feel them anymore.”  
  
Fuuma’s eyebrows screwed together in thought as he puzzled over this statement. “Where’d they go?”   
  
“Another dimension, I suspect.”   
  
“H-huh?” Fuuma asked. He’d never heard of such a thing. He closed the book he’d been reading and hesitantly approached his brother, looking up at him. “Brother?”   
  
Seishirou smiled wanly.  
  
“I can’t feel them in this world any longer,” his brother said. “The attendants said that they’d gone on a long journey and did not intend to return.”   
  
“But why would the head of the family…?”  
  
“I suspect it was that hot-headed brother of his,” Seishirou said with only a barest of shrugs. He chuckled. “Kamui really is a selfish child, despite his age.”   
  
Fuuma stared at him. “What do you mean…?”  
  
Seishirou’s smile did not waver. “It seems I must have been worth something to Subaru, if he saved my life like that.”  
  
Fuuma wasn’t sure what ‘like that’ meant, or what had happened that would warrant someone, a vampire, no less, to save his brother. Fuuma frowned, trying to work his head around all this information (or lack thereof) his brother was tossing his way, cryptic and difficult to decipher. Seishirou stood and Fuuma did as well, trotting after his brother as he moved swiftly through the apartment, acting as if Fuuma was not there with him.   
  
“This world is not safe so long as I am in it,” Seishirou said. He chuckled. “That’s what Kamui told me. It seems he really meant it, if it’s true he’s skipped dimensions with my target.”   
  
Fuuma blinked up at him. “It’s possible to travel dimensions?”   
  
Something akin to hope sparked in his chest.  
  
Seishirou nodded. “It takes a strong amount of magic, however, more than what those two have, even together.”   
  
The spark died before it could light anything.   
  
His brother kept moving. “They had to have had outside help. I suspect…”   
  
“But why would they suddenly leave now?”   
  
Seishirou actually paused, thinking this over. “Kamui does not trust me.” He grinned down at his brother. “I wonder why that is?”   
  
Fuuma frowned.   
  
Seishirou looked out the window, thoughtful a moment, before asking no one, “I wonder if Subaru wanted to go, as well…”   
  
Fuuma couldn’t comprehend that look, and how, for a split second, his brother looked wistful. He cleared his throat, seizing upon what he could understand—  
  
“If they’ve left and don’t intend to return, it’s as if the job is complete, isn’t it? It’s the same as if they were dead,” Fuuma told him. He touched his brother’s sleeve. “Right?”   
  
Seishirou was quiet a long moment before he chuckled. “Yes. I suppose so.”   
  
“So it’s over, you don’t have to think about it any longer.” Fuuma perked up. “The job’s complete.”   
  
He thought this would make his brother happy. But his brother’s expression did not shift. Silently, he looked out the window again, searching for something that Fuuma could not see or understand.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Brother, you haven’t been eating,” Fuuma told him a few weeks later.   
  
Seishirou glanced up from his book and looked momentarily surprised before he smiled. “Oh?”   
  
Fuuma stared at him.  
  
Seishirou chuckled. “Are you worried?”   
  
Fuuma laughed. “I was just wondering if I should stop bothering trying to make food.”   
  
“You aren’t much of a cook anyway,” Seishirou dismissed. “More potatoes tonight?”   
  
Fuuma bit back a frown, forcing himself to smile. “Brother, I haven’t seen you eat in weeks.”   
  
And it wasn’t like his brother had been gone from the house, either. He apparently hadn’t been assigned a new assassination plot because he read through all the books in the library now, not believing Fuuma when he told his brother that none of the books had anything about vampires in it. And it left him wondering why his brother was still so fixated on understanding two beings who didn’t matter anymore.   
  
_Kamui…_ he couldn’t help but think. He wondered where the twins had left to, where they were now, and why they’d left.   
  
Seishirou slanted him a look. “You really are a fool, aren’t you?”   
  
“Huh?”  
  
Seishirou closed the book he was reading with a snap. “I guess it can’t be helped. You don’t have any magic in that empty body of yours, so how could you possibly sense it?”  
  
Fuuma’s eyes widened in surprise as his brother stood and approached him. “Brother, what is it that—”  
  
Whatever he was about to say however, was lost as one of Seishirou’s nails suddenly extended, shaping into claws and impaling the wall just behind Fuuma’s ear. The words died in Fuuma’s throat and he stared in shock, mouth opened vacantly.   
  
Seishirou moved his hand, observing each finger as the claws seemed to grow and shrink at his whim. He watched it with as much indifference as he watched most things, and yet his eyes would not tear away from them. Fuuma realized his knees were shaking.   
  
“What…?”  
  
“Do you still not realize?” his brother asked him and when he met his brother’s eyes, the eyes were burning an angry golden color that didn’t suit the rest of his impassive face. The pupils were slit as he watched his brother and he approached him, hands hanging at his side so that the claws dragged across the rugs on the wooden floors, leaving long gashes following his wake. Fuuma couldn’t move, staring into those eyes and unable to run away.   
  
“I—” Fuuma began but one of the claws pressed against his young throat and he suddenly stopped speaking.   
  
“Now, Kamui has no hope of beating me,” Seishirou told him and smiled slow and steady. “I’ve grown stronger, haven’t I, Fuuma?”   
  
Fuuma swallowed, feeling the claw’s point pressed against his skin.   
  
“How did this happen?” Fuuma whispered. “What are you?”  
  
Seishirou raised one eyebrow, looking amused a moment, as always, before he pulled the claw back away from his little brother’s neck. Fuuma, still tense, backed away a few steps until he was pressed up against the wall.   
  
“What do you think I am?” Seishirou whispered, towering over his brother, the lighting in the room lighting his back and casting his face in shadow. Trapped underneath his shadow, Fuuma could do nothing but stare. Seishirou chuckled. “I have become one of them.”   
  
“But…”   
  
“To save my life,” Seishirou said and then laughed low and in the back of his throat. “It seems I was correct in saying that Subaru was far too kind for his own good… to help the person who was sent to kill him.”   
  
Fuuma’s brows furrowed.   
  
Seishirou kneeled down to his level. Fuuma could see his brother’s face better now, though the golden eyes still threw him off. Seishirou watched him as he spoke. “People with empathy in this world…”  
  
“… Will all meet their downfall,” Seishirou agreed and laughed lowly again.   
  
Fuuma inhaled sharply as long claws danced against his neck, teasing.   
  
“He thinks he can get away from me,” Seishirou said quietly, his feral eyes dancing. “They really are foolish, aren’t they, Fuuma?”   
  
One of the claws scraped against Fuuma’s neck and Fuuma seized up, eyes wide and wobbling in their sockets, as his entire body screamed at him to run away but he was left rooted to the spot in fear.   
  
“Not like you, though,” Seishirou laughed. “You don’t feel like that anymore, do you?”  
  
Fuuma clenched his eyes shut.   
  
Seishirou pulled back his hand, dripping with blood from his little brother’s neck. He regarded it impassively a moment before running his tongue over his thumb, tasting it. His golden eyes flared as if a fire had been lit. All this Fuuma did not see, as he gripped at the wall, swallowing thickly and his heart hammering in his chest.   
  
“He won’t get away.”  
  
“W-what…” Fuuma swallowed. “What will you do?”   
  
He opened his eyes again to see Seishirou watching him. They stayed like that a moment before his brother bent his head and pressed his mouth against the wound in Fuuma’s neck. His heart hammered away in his ears but he did nothing to try and stop his brother, eyes glazing over in his shock. Seishirou drank from him for a long moment without saying anything and the room slowly ticked away into time and left Fuuma stranded and confused.   
  
When he finished, his brother pulled back, wiping his thumb against his lips to clear away trace amounts of blood still there. Fuuma felt vaguely woozy but did not push his brother away as hands, lacking claws, brushed back his hair.   
  
“I’ll do what I must. It can’t be helped.”   
  
“But… why does it matter?” Fuuma asked, shaking his head. “You’re stronger now, you have your magic a-and… and that. And the people you were meant to kill are gone forever. So—”  
  
Seishirou’s smile was almost kind as he said, “Even if they are not here, they’re still alive. How can I accept that so willingly?”   
  
Fuuma began to speak again but Seishirou continued as if Fuuma were almost not there.   
  
“No,” his brother said, staring up at the ceiling in thought. Seishirou looked thoughtfully down at him before looking towards the fireplace, where a weak little log was still burning. “No, that won’t do.”   
  
“But why?” Fuuma asked.   
  
“I won’t allow any of my targets to get away,” Seishirou said quietly, and the weight of his words hung heavy in the air, unchallenged and somehow darker and deeper than anything his brother had said before that.   
  
Fuuma wasn’t sure what to make of it. “But—”  
  
“But what?” his brother cut him off, calm.  
  
“But why do you care?”   
  
Seishirou paused, thinking this over, before smiling down at his brother. He ruffled his hair in an almost tender gesture.   
  
“I wonder if this is a situation where one says ‘you’ll understand when you’re older’?” he mused softly to himself.  
  
The hand stroking his hair shifted so it was covering Fuuma’s eyes.   
  
“But for now… you need to sleep.”   
  
“Brother—?”   
  
“You won’t see me again, Fuuma,” his brother told him and Fuuma froze in shock. Seishirou tilted his head to the side and laughed low in his throat. “So be good. Don’t do anything foolish. You aren’t safe in this world now, so protect yourself.”   
  
The magic pulsed in the room and before Fuuma could yell out to his brother to stop, he collapsed on the ground, asleep.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Fuuma awoke with a start, gasping for air. He sat up, slumped in front of the fireplace in the library. His hand rose to his neck, and cringed as he pressed too hard against the wound there. He whipped his head around in fear, eyes wide. It was night time and his brother was nowhere to be found.   
  
“Br—” Fuuma began and stood quickly before stumbling over his feet and falling flat on his face. This did not deter him, however, as he was quickly on his feet again and running, searching everywhere for his brother.   
  
He searched the entire room and it was only as he was about to careen down the hallway and into the front hall that he heard the hum of his brother’s magic. He pressed against the wall, not wishing to be sensed. If his brother had wanted him to be asleep for whatever reason, if he realized he was awake he would use more magic. If there was anything he’d learned in this household his entire life, it was to be silent.   
  
He pressed against the wall and cautiously leaned around the corner, eyeing his brother. He stood in front of the fireplace.   
  
The magic swirled around the room, as if the windows had been left open to usher in a powerful wind. It swirled and surged in the room before coiling into a center point just in front of Seishirou, whose expression was crinkled in concentration and lacked his customary smile. Fuuma stared in awe as the hum became almost unbearable and then suddenly stopped with an almost audible sigh of relief from the magic itself, and converged at the central point in front of his brother was a flat disk and what looked like a woman in it.   
  
She was tall, ethereal, with eyes the color of wine and long black hair sliding over her shoulders as she turned towards the disk—towards his brother.   
  
She smiled at him, and when she spoke, her voice was both mysterious and disarming. “I was expecting you.”  
  
“Am I correct in assuming you are the Witch of Wishes?” Seishirou asked pleasantly, the smile back on his face as if it’d never left.   
  
The woman, the Witch of Wishes, continued to smile. “I have been called that.”   
  
“Then I suppose you realize that I have a wish.”   
  
“I do,” the witch said pleasantly, smiling one rather mysterious smile after another, one that could have put Seishirou’s to shame. She rested her hands on her hips, jutting one out to the side as she stood. “And what a wish it is. Will you be able to pay the price?”   
  
Seishirou was all smiles. “Who knows?”  
  
“Who indeed,” the witch said with a secretive smile still tugging at her face. “What is your name?”  
  
“Seishirou,” Fuuma heard his brother say, watching the side of his face from his position. His brother did not take his eyes away from the witch, which was just as well because otherwise he might have seen Fuuma. But both brothers were too engrossed in this mysterious wish granter to pay the other much mind.   
  
The witch’s eyes glittered. “Ah, so.”   
  
They stood in silence.   
  
The witch shifted, her eyes serious now. “And what is your wish?”   
  
Fuuma’s eyes gazed back to his brother, unsure what it was his brother’s wish was—what could his brother possibly want—and who was this mysterious woman? He couldn’t wrap his mind around what was happening, that his brother would allow himself to be ushered like this, and why he would even feel the need to do that in the first place.   
  
“To find the owner of this blood,” Seishirou murmured. “You know of whom I speak?”   
  
“I do,” the witch said. “He is no longer in your world.”   
  
“He has left along with his brother. And I have reason to suspect that you assisted them in doing so.”   
  
The Witch of Wishes did not answer this accusation, and instead said, “There is a price for every wish. Equal payment.”   
  
“And what will my payment be?”  
  
“To have the ability to travel dimensions, searching for something you have lost will be a heavy price. Are you willing to pay it?”  
  
Seishirou’s eyes narrowed. “What is the price?”   
  
The Witch of Wishes moved her hand, pointing at him squarely. “The thing most precious to you.”  
  
There was a long silence, and Fuuma realized he was holding his breath, his eyes wide.   
  
Seishirou chuckled. “There is nothing that I hold to be ‘precious’.”   
  
The witch smiled, all too knowing. “To move freely to wherever it is you wish to go, you must give me what is most precious to you. That is the blood that was given to you by the one you wish to find.”   
  
Seishirou stiffened.   
  
The witch continued. “That is your connection to that child and it is what is making you strong enough to summon me now like this. You covet that power but in order to achieve this new power, you must be willing to give it away as payment.”   
  
Fuuma stared at his brother.  
  
Seishirou was silent a long moment before he smiled and said, “I refuse.”   
  
Fuuma bit his lip. The witch continued to smile.   
  
“Then you will not be able to follow after him.”  
  
Seishirou’s eyebrows knit together and the smile on his face slipped away as he thought, expression serious and angered. He stood in silence a long moment, not moving nor speaking. The witch was patient, standing inside her disk and watching the elder brother with hooded eyes. Fuuma bit back the words he wished to call out to his brother.   
  
“… I cannot give away this blood,” Seishirou said at last.   
  
The Witch of Wishes was silent a moment, as well, before she said: “Then you cannot move freely.”   
  
“Must I be able to move freely?”   
  
“If you wish to find him, it would be difficult otherwise.”   
  
“I cannot give this blood away,” Seishirou repeated.   
  
The witch closed her eyes and hummed low in her throat. She held a pipe of tobacco in her hand and she took a long inhalation, thinking as curls of smoke coiled out of her parted lips. When she opened her eyes, they watched Seishirou lazily. “Perhaps there can be a new arrangement made.”   
  
“Is that so?”   
  
The witch watched him more, observing the man’s stance. He did not back down, meeting her gaze evenly.   
  
“I will give you a means to travel dimensions, but it will be a limited power; you only have a finite amount of worlds you can travel to and if you do not find the one you are looking for before then, then you will lose that chance.”   
  
“And in exchange?”   
  
“You will give me the aggressive powers that blood has granted you in addition to half of your own magic.” Her eyes locked on his. “You will give me one of your eyes and in exchange you will be able to travel.”   
  
There was a long silence as this arrangement fell into silence, and yet echoed in Fuuma’s ears.   
  
Seishirou watched her, no longer smiling and only looking angry. He frowned and his eyebrows knit together for a moment before his shoulders stiffened and straightened.   
  
Fuuma was sure he would refuse that as well and was shocked when his brother said, “I accept.”   
  
The wish seller blew away a cloud of smoke and it curled around her face as she said. “Then that will be your payment.”   
  
What happened next was a large gust of magical power, swirling around the room and knocking Fuuma back off his feet. He fell to the ground with a tiny cry that was drowned out by the roaring winds in the room. He heard the smallest of scoffs in the center of the vortex and knew that the witch was collecting his brother’s eye as they spoke. He tried to fight against the wind, in hopes of reaching his brother, but it was too powerful for him to fight against. And just as suddenly as it began, it disappeared and his ears were ringing in the silence.   
  
His brother was on his back, eyes clenched shut. The disk still hovered and Fuuma paid it no mind as he rushed over towards Seishirou.   
  
“Brother!”   
  
He glanced up at the disk, and saw the witch watching him. His heart jolted as their eyes locked. She watched him for a long moment, saying nothing, before she smiled very softly at him. Then the disk flickered and disappeared.   
  
Fuuma watched a moment before he fell to his knees, shaking his brother’s shoulder. “Brother! Brother?”   
  
Seishirou shifted and groaned a bit, face scrunching up. When he blinked his eyes, there was one missing, replaced only with a vaguely bluish-white glass eye. Fuuma stared at it. Seishirou’s eyes narrowed as he grew used to the sudden strangeness this vision brought him, discombobulated. He reached up a hand but his depth perception was unused to this arrangement and he ended up missing Fuuma’s head completely.   
  
“What are you doing up?”   
  
“You’re leaving,” Fuuma whispered and it was not a question.   
  
“I am,” Seishirou agreed and reached up his hand, feeling the spot around his right eyes, suddenly missing and never to be returned again. His eyebrows furrowed and he smiled absently in thought, and Fuuma could not even begin to understand what his brother was thinking.   
  
“All this just so you can… find him again?” Fuuma asked in disbelief.   
  
Seishirou laughed, low and vague. He pressed his thumb against Fuuma’s cheek, pushing almost affectionately before dropping his hand away. He closed his eyes, trying to grow used to the sudden lack of strength and lack of vision. His power fluxed in his core, growing used to how it’d suddenly been halved.   
  
“Is the witch gone?”  
  
Fuuma glanced up, just in case, then nodded. “The disk disappeared.”   
  
“Thought so,” Seishirou sighed and sunk against the wooden floor. Fuuma touched his brother’s face, frowning. Seishirou cracked his eyes open and looked amused. “What are you doing?”  
  
Fuuma took his hands back. “Nothing. Making sure you aren’t sick.”   
  
“That’s the least of my worries, now,” Seishirou said with a chuckle.   
  
“Why did you do that? Why did you give away so much power for the sake of—for the sake of—”   
  
“Subaru?” Seishirou guessed.  
  
Fuuma nodded. “They’re not in this world! Is it so important to you that you kill them?”   
  
Seishirou chuckled softly. “That’s not something I expect you to understand, Fuuma.”   
  
The little brother’s face twisted in annoyance.   
  
Seishirou eyed him. “… Or perhaps you understand more than I think.”   
  
“Brother…”  
  
“Let this be a lesson to you, Fuuma,” Seishirou said as he slowly stood up on his legs. If he felt disoriented or destabilized, he did not show it and stood tall and without wavering. Fuuma stared up at him, and Seishirou continued. “Disconnect yourself from everyone.”   
  
“I already…”  
  
Seishirou pushed against him, moving him away. Fuuma obeyed. Seishirou chuckled, “Keep everyone at arm’s length, or else it’ll be troublesome.”   
  
The magic swirled around the room, and the glass eye seemed to glow. Fuuma stared in shock.   
  
“Why are you doing this?”  
  
Seishirou looked up at the ceiling, serious.   
  
“I wonder…”  
  
And then he was gone.


	5. Break the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ten years pass.

If Fuuma felt his home world to be barren and desolate before, the death of his mother and the departure of his brother did very little to remedy his opinions. There was no one to come home to, no one to leave for. He was by himself, and he saw no value in himself. He spent the first day staring at the spot his brother had disappeared to, before looking up at the mirror on the wall.  
  
A wide-eyed, paled face stared back at him. He studied the stranger in the mirror for the longest time, tracing the boyish face that stared back at him. He was still so young, and now he was alone.   
  
After the staring became too insistent, after he was sure that his reflection was mocking him, Fuuma stood and punched the mirror. The glass shattered against the force and shards of the mirror sailed through the air and he flinched at both the pain and at the fear of getting those iridescent sparkles into his eyes. He cringed as the large shards fell to the floor and shattered across his feet, cutting and drawing blood.   
  
His knuckles bloody, he ran around the entire house, smashing every mirror he came across until his knuckles were jagged and cut, slashes like claw marks scraped across his skin. He picked at them, peeled at them, until the blood stained the floors and the walls, grinding under his fingernails and staying there, drying and coating the underside of his nails. His fingerprints left bloody marks behind.   
  
After every mirror in the house was smashed, after he’d sidestepped as many shards as he could and still managed to get slivers of reminders in the heels of his feet, shards of glass dust in his eyes, he curled into a ball in his room and slept.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Days passed. He sat in front of the fireplace, watching the wood there cackle and crackle and shift as it became nothing but smoke and embers.   
  
His fingers traced the jagged, unhealed wounds on his hands, digging into them until they bled again.   
  
They would scar, he realized dimly, but found that he didn’t care. The blood dripped on the floor.   
  
He sat for hours, watching the fire burn in the fireplace, until it burnt down to nothing more than a tiny flame, and finally the dying embers, red hot and slowly sinking into ashen gray, stirring in the remains of a fire as the wind blew down through the chimney. Fuuma didn’t take his gaze away from it, even when the room sank into darkness.   
  
And then he began to laugh. His fingers traced the pathway of destruction across his hands and he laughed and laughed and laughed into the darkness, staring up at the ceiling where the world had dropped down to swallow his brother and take him away. His voice echoed in the empty apartment, empty and alone save for him only and the droplets of blood leading a trail through the hallways. There was no one here for him, and there never would be again. The only things that had ever made a moment of difference to him, and, dare he think it, important to him, were gone forever, fleeing to places he could not follow.   
  
He laughed until his gut hurt, until he realized that the tears spilling down his cheeks were neither from mirth nor from unhappiness. They were shedding slivers of mirror stuck in his pupils.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He pulled on a pair of gloves, to hide the scars on his hands.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
What he hated the most was how quiet the house was. He couldn’t hear anything outside the windows—his mother had designed them that way, refortified it with magic that still lingered, even if he could not sense it. He spent his days in almost absolute silence, shattered only by the turn of a page in the book he would read, or the sound of his footsteps echoing into the nothingness.   
  
It was eerie at best, but he quickly grew used to it. Even before his brother’s departure or his mother’s death, he had been used to the silence. He’d needed to hone his senses in order to sneak around properly. He’d learned to hear, to see, to sense things that he never would have been able to if he hadn’t made himself learn. He compensated for his lack of magic by being more than ordinary.   
  
He read quickly now. Mostly because he’d read the books in their library scores of times to the point where he could recite quite a few chapters in a few books by heart. His favorite were the books recounting extraordinary adventures to distant worlds, reading fantasies about mystical worlds that didn’t really exist but Fuuma liked to imagine existed in another dimension.   
  
As the days passed he grew exponentially jealous of his brother, who crossed different worlds probably every day, seeing new sights and new sounds. And he probably didn’t even appreciate it, either, Fuuma realized with distaste, simply because he was doing it to chase a vampire.   
  
He frowned down at his gloved hands, thoughtful. He crushed the feelings down, refused to acknowledge them. He detached himself from those feelings, from that longing. From things he could not have, he had no business desiring. These were things he would never say out loud, never admit, even if, deep down, he knew he couldn’t let go of it.   
  
“He told me to distance myself,” he told his hands, who, obviously, did not respond back. Fuuma was thankful that he hadn’t gone crazy enough or lonely enough to actually carry more than just a one-sided conversation with anything in this apartment. “Told me not to let my heart be taken by anything, not let anyone disarm it.”  
  
He frowned further, then remembered himself and forced a smile until it felt natural. He sighed.   
  
“So then why did he go chasing after someone if it wasn’t to kill them?” he wondered to himself. He looked down at the book, running his fingers across the lines of words and symbols, an ancient language he couldn’t quite read but understood enough to get a general comprehension of the story being told. “… Brother doesn’t make any sense to me.”   
  
He slumped.   
  
“Nothing makes sense to me.”   
  
He bowed his head, still smiling in a way that suggested calm or resignation.  
  
“I really don’t understand anything at all.”   
  
He lifted his head and looked out the window, where the sun in the sky illuminated the dirt and grime saturating the outside walls of the buildings in the city. Down below, the streets probably looked bad enough for a plague.   
  
He closed his eyes.  
  
“I wonder if he’ll find him.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Somewhere in the house he heard the door shut. It was soft, almost slight, and Fuuma wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t known that there was no sound in this apartment anymore. He jerked his head up from the book he’d been reading before he’d fallen asleep. One of the pages stuck to his cheek, but his eyes were fixed squarely on the doorway, ears perked for any other sound.   
  
There was nothing, but the stillness was different from before. Fuuma slowly stood, holding his breath and making sure his footsteps made no sound as he sunk away from the desk in the center of the library and moved into the shadows, looming behind shelves and shelves of books, eyes poised to peer through the cracks in the books. His heart was beating fiercely in his chest, and his body was taut, coiled like a spring.   
  
And in the distance he heard a floorboard creek. Fuuma sank back further, eyes scanning the room until he found the fireplace for the library, the dead remains of a burnt log in the hearth. His eyes darted back to the door, before he moved silently towards it, ducking under the brick face and climbing up into the chimney a few feet, knocking stray soot loose, dusting into his face and his hair. He blinked to banish the ash in his eyes but it remained. He didn’t move. He stayed in absolute perfect silence.   
  
It proved to be a good move because a moment later he heard a blast of magic knock the door off its hinges, slamming into the desk. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it—the crack of wood against the table and the sound of paper and books scattering to the ground. There was a silence, and then the hush of male voices speaking.   
  
“You said the child would be here. Are you certain?”   
  
“It’s our job to eliminate him.” The second voice sounded older. “Lady Setsuka is dead and her son is missing. All that remains is the youngest, and he is a weak link. We must eliminate the bloodline to ensure the secrets.”   
  
“Our records show that the child has been under house arrest since the incident at the Northern Mercy Cathedral. He should be here.”  
  
“I can’t sense anyone in this house. There must be lingering protective magic in this place. It’s powerful.”   
  
“You know how long it took us to find this place on its own.”   
  
Fuuma dared not move and listened as they threw down the bookshelves, hundreds of precious books scattering across the entire library, wood smashing, and all the while the angry hum of magic.   
  
“It’d figure that there would be cloaking magic, protecting that child’s whereabouts.”   
  
“Is it possible that he has left this place?”   
  
“I am not willing to take that chance. Most likely he is hiding.”   
  
They lapsed into silence and Fuuma’s arms shook in his effort to keep him lofted in the chimney. He clenched his eyes shut, listening as best he could and begging to anyone who would listen—he was so used to being unheard—to not be found.   
  
_Please don’t find me, please don’t find me, please don’t find me._   
  
More smashing.   
  
_Leave me alone. Leave this place. Don’t find me. Please, leave me be._  
  
He was only a child, not even ten yet, and his muscles hadn’t developed very well. He held himself up as best he could, but with every passing moment he felt himself grow weaker and weaker. He knew that if he were to drop down now, or to shift and knock the soot askew, he would be dead.   
  
They had come to kill him.   
  
_They aren’t the ones who are supposed to kill me,_ he thought, before he could stop the idea from forming in his head. But once it was there, it wouldn’t leave, and his eyes popped open.   
  
More shelves fell to the ground.   
  
“He isn’t here.”   
  
“We’ve searched this place and yet there’s no sign of him.”  
  
“Keep your voice down.”  
  
“You’re right. He could still be hiding.”   
  
He heard the hum of magic again.  
  
“We won’t let him get away.”   
  
“Hm.”  
  
“Burn it down.”  
  
“Yes, sir.”   
  
And the room surged with magic and exploded. Fuuma smelled burning and realized they’d ignited the books. The library was like a fire pit, waiting to ignite, with yards and yards of kindle at its fingertips. Fuuma could smell smoke and he fought back the urge to start coughing. It only took a few moments before he saw the flickering of flames licking off beyond his vision, casting a warm orange-yellow glow on the brick façade of the fireplace, casting shadows and stirring the ash.   
  
“Let’s move.”   
  
“Right.”   
  
He heard a window smash and knew that the hunters had left. Fuuma didn’t dare move, though, unsure how long he should wait until he should move. And yet, at the same time, he could smell the smoke and hear the burning of fire. He knew that it was only a matter of time before he was smoked out or passed out from the smoke inhalation. He suspected they would have set the other rooms on fire. They intended to kill him this way, and to dispose of all evidence of his existence.   
  
It would be as if he’d never existed at all.   
  
He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.   
  
He waited.   
  
It was excruciating to wait. But he held firm, his hands wobbling and his feet aching and his eyes burning from ash and the remnants of mirror still lodged in his eyes.   
  
Once it became too much to bear, Fuuma took his chances. Moving swiftly, he shimmied his way up the chimney, using his legs and his arms to move as quickly as possible up the vertical shaft and towards fresh air and the night sky. Looking up, blinking his way through ash and soot as the only world he’d ever known burned below him, turning into an inferno from hell, he could see the stars and the barest fingernail of the moon. His gloved hands dug into the chimney, looking for small footholds as he moved as quickly as he could upwards, upwards towards the night sky.   
  
He reached the top and broke through the chimney top, inhaling sharply the fresh air. In the end, it wasn’t that fresh, being in the center of an industrial city, but it was cleaner than the smoke now suffocating his home. He could see the flames bouncing down at the bottom of his climb, destroying everything he’d known.   
  
He pulled himself out of the chimney, covered now completely in soot. He didn’t pause to think, only reacted, dashing across the rooftop towards the other buildings surrounding his apartment building. He lunged, jumping the distance between the two and landing with a thump on the roof one building over, sliding down the tiles and cracking his elbow against the roof. He hissed in pain, biting back a cry of pain and tasting the blood from his bitten lip. He was up on his feet shortly thereafter, though, and dashing across this roof, lunging once again to the next one. He continued on in this fashion, moving as quickly as he could away from his home, the blood roaring in his ears and his lungs screaming for ear. But he did not stop.   
  
He jumped once last time and rolled down the roof, falling over onto the balcony. He laid there a moment before jumping to his feet and hoisting himself over the railing, dropping down onto a fire escape and sliding down the cold iron until he reached the ground level. The concrete was ten feet below him and he let go, falling and crumbling as his legs finally gave out and he collapsed into a puddle of cold, dirty street water.   
  
Fuuma stayed there, lying there and feeling the water seep into his clothing and wash away the soot on his face. Blood drizzled over his chin as he panted, trying to summon some semblance of control in his breathing, wheezing as he greedily gulped for air.   
  
After a long pause, he managed to hoist himself up, his arms shaking in protest. He sat on his knees, staring up at the sky and panting still, his chest heaving. He watched the solitary stars up there, through darkness—how late was it? The streetlights were out—and released a deep sigh.   
  
He wobbled to his feet and staggered out of the alleyway he’d fallen into, stepping out onto the abandoned streets. Down the block, he could clearly see his home burning to ashes and dust.   
  
He stared, impassive, feeling no sympathy for the loss. The apathy surprised him.   
  
But only for a moment.   
  
_I’m free._   
  
He blinked, once. His gloved hands clenched and he stared at the flames licking the sky, breaking it in two and sending a plume of smoke into the heavens.   
  
_I’m free._   
  
He stared.   
  
“… I’m free,” he whispered to himself and smiled widely.   
  
He turned around and raced off into the darkness.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
The ripped clothing, the soot, and the cuts did wonders for his image—he transformed overnight into a street urchin and it was more than he could ever possibly want. He wasn’t tied down to that place, and could go where he wanted now. He had no money, though, and only the clothing on his back. But it was the summer months, so he had a while before he would have to worry about warmth and shelter from the rain.   
  
He lived on the street for weeks, managing to use his stealth to steal food. The soot disguised him, but it was harder for him to see—the lingering shards of glass in his eyes and the soot from his escape clouded his vision. He had to rely on sound and sense to move. Even without magic, he could still feel people, he could hear them approaching, sense their movements and feel the vibrations in the ground. He’d gotten more than enough food to last him for a few hours before he would steal more.   
  
And he was content. Or, at least he thought he was. It was a feeling he was unused to, something foreign and something that almost made him want to smile genuinely. Sometimes, he would. Sometimes, he would smile up at the clouds in the sky or the birds in the trees in the parks in the center of the city. Sometimes, when he laughed, it didn’t sound heartbreaking.   
  
It became easier to pretend, because in some ways it wasn’t pretend anymore.   
  
Of course, there were times when his hands were nearly cut off for stealing. He trusted no one, in this city. Those who smiled at him, those who had compassion—they only wanted something from him. That, at least, he’d learned from his family. Kindness is only used as a weapon, a smile the razorblade. Kindness, sympathy, and compassion were never genuine, he decided, only used when something was wanted.   
  
He’d been kind, before. He’d been kind because he’d wanted acceptance, he’d wanted to make his brother and mother notice him. He hadn’t been kind to them to help them, he’d been “kind” because he thought it would be good for him, in the end.   
  
He wiped the soot from his nose, or more like rubbed it in, to better his disguise. “All kindness is a lie.”  
  
He avoided everyone with a smile. He hated anyone who could remind him of himself, anyone who could remind him of the pathetic child he’d once been, or remind him of the thing he’d become.   
  
Which was why he did not recoil anymore, when the angry policemen or shopkeepers grabbed him, scowling at him and glaring and cursing him. Because at least they were being honest.   
  
This shopkeeper in particular was being rather harsh, however, joggling Fuuma and wrenching the apple from his hand. He twisted Fuuma’s arm and Fuuma did not cry out, just continued to smile absently at the wall.   
  
“What do you think you’re doing, brat?” he barked.   
  
“I was hungry,” Fuuma said cheerfully, smiling inanely up at the angry man.   
  
“You didn’t pay for this, damn it,” the man snarled. “I should have you arrested for this.”  
  
“Hmhm,” Fuuma agreed.   
  
“What’s your name, twerp?”   
  
This was a new one. As of yet, no one had asked him for his name, but he hesitated for half a second. He could not give out his real name, not anymore. His brother had warned him that this world was not safe, and the visit weeks earlier that destroyed his home was testament to that. They were on the lookout for “Fuuma”, trying to find him so they could kill him.   
  
He couldn’t be “Fuuma” anymore. Not in this world.   
  
The man was jostling him again. “Well?”   
  
“I’m ‘Kamui’,” Fuuma told him, the first name that popped into his head. His eyes widened a fraction of an inch before he was grinning up at the man, twisting his arm away from his grip and stumbling backwards. “My name is ‘Kamui’!”   
  
And he grabbed another apple and ran, slipping into the crowd before the man could chase after him and turn him over to the police. He raced through the crowd, weaving between people and clutching the apple in his gloved palm.   
  
Why had he chosen that name?   
  
  
\---  
  
  
This is what his life became. He’d lost his home, and he abandoned his name.   
  
He was nothing but a shadow, moving through life with no one to remember him or to care about his existence. He was nobody, and of no use to anyone.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He would spend his nights watching the stars, tracing the constellations he knew by heart and wonder if his brother, Subaru, or Kamui saw the same stars in the worlds they were in.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Ten years passed.   
  
He grew from a child with a rounded, boyish face into a lanky, slumped teenager. He moved awkwardly, but with no less skill. His muscles were tight from the sudden growth, but he still moved with skilled precision, slinking and sinking into shadow. No one heard him when he stole from their wallets or from their food stands.   
  
He grew used to the shards of glass in his eyes. They no longer hurt, merely acted like floaters in his vision, reminding him of everything that he’d once had and once was. His vision suffered because of it, but in its absence his other senses heightened. He began as a pickpocket and steadily moved up to robbing people’s homes for treasures he could pawn off for money, in order to buy food or, in the winter months, a night in the inn so he could take a bath.   
  
No one knew his name, and those who he was forced to introduce himself to, only knew him as “Kamui”, a simple, mysterious lad.   
  
He grew stronger every day, used to scurrying across rooftops, or through houses undetected. With his silence and stealth, he was nothing but a shadow. It was as if he did not exist at all.   
  
But that was the way it’d always been, he figured to himself. When had he ever existed as nothing more than a backdrop?   
  
His life became nothing but a monotonous continuation. He lived on the street, lived without restraint or boundaries. He smiled as his default now.   
  
It wasn’t until his eighteenth birthday that his world changed again.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
It started in the dark hours of the night, after the streetlights’ candles had been put out one by one and the city was bathed in darkness.   
  
He sat in the park, warming his hands with a small fire he’d managed to create using garbage and some matches he’d stolen a few weeks prior. The fire smelled awful and Fuuma disliked the way the flames lit up the jagged, old scars crossing over his palms, knuckles, fingers, and the backs of his hands. It looked like a labyrinth, but one he would never want to be lost in. But his hands threatened frostbite, so it couldn’t be helped.   
  
He yawned, and his jaw cracked.   
  
His thoughts moved, as they often did in times like this, when he had nothing to busy himself with, towards his brother. He wondered what world he was in today. He wondered how long he’d been traveling—did time travel the same across dimensions, he often thought—and whether he’d found the one he was searching for.   
  
And once again, as his thoughts always moved, he began to feel the familiar spark of jealousy at his brother for being able to move wherever he pleased, to be free from this desolate world where he didn’t even “exist” anymore. The only ones who knew of him, the Brotherhood, believed him to be dead and had long since forgotten him. To everyone else, he was a homeless simpleton with a name easy to forget.   
  
He watched the smoke curl and sighed, wishing that he could be free of this world, wishing that he could have gone along with his brother, wishing that he had the strength and the power and the ability to take his own wishes into his own hands, to be independently free. But he had no magic, and thus, was nothing. In the end, that’s all he was.   
  
The smoke curled again. He watched it.   
  
“Happy birthday to me,” he said mutely to himself, rubbing his hands together. “Should I make a wish?”   
  
The smoke coiled up and twisted. Fuuma watched it, curious, as he’d never seen the smoke behave this way before. It twisted, looping around and it took Fuuma a long moment to realize that it was spelling something and the fire was cackling and crackling not from the flames but from the pulse of magic—he hadn’t felt magic in ten years and it somehow felt strange and foreign to him, and yet familiar.   
  
_What is your wish?_ the smoke spelled.   
  
Fuuma stared at it, and wasn’t sure if he should answer. It’d been a long time since he’d talked to something inhuman.   
  
The smoke coiled. _“I will arrive tomorrow. Be prepared to pay for that wish.” -- The Witch of Dimensions_   
  
Fuuma watched in suppressed shock as the smoke uncurled itself and returned to behaving like smoke should, moving upwards and dissipating into the chilly night air. Fuuma swallowed and wondered if the floaters in his eyes were playing tricks on him again, if he’d truly gone crazy now, as an adult.   
  
But there was also something sparking in his chest, something he hadn’t felt in a long time.   
  
Hope.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He didn’t move from that spot. He waited. It was in the early morning, after the stars had faded and the sun threatened the horizon. Fuuma watched as the sky above him sagged and broke, sinking down to his level and shattering away, revealing the witch he hadn’t seen in ten years, and yet she had not aged at all.   
  
She was tall, slender, and her red eyes found him instantly, staring him down. She invited him with a smile and he stood up, realizing dimly that he was taller than her, and yet he felt so small in comparison to her.   
  
“Hello, child,” she greeted.   
  
His mouth was dry. “Hello.”   
  
“I have heard your wish for ten years now,” she said calmly, as if picking up a conversation that’d lapsed into a momentary silence. Her eyes fell shut and she tilted her head to the side, as if listening to the sun rise over the buildings in the distance. Fuuma could not tear his eyes away from her. She spoke, “You have waited, unable to contact me despite that wish. That feeling of prolonged frustration is the price that was needed in order to summon me here, when that wish became too strong to be neglected.”   
  
“My… wish…?” Fuuma murmured, and then remembered to smile. It was the first time in a very long time that he’d forgotten to smile.   
  
“That’s right,” she said and opened her eyes. “I am the Witch of Wishes, the Witch of Dimensions. But,” she said, eyes glittering. “You may call me Yuuko.”   
  
“Miss Yuuko,” Fuuma began, and paused, smiling and still feeling impossibly small in comparison to Yuuko. “You’re here to… grant my wish?”   
  
“If that is what you want, Fuuma.”   
  
He started, but the smile did not falter.   
  
Yuuko looked too knowing. “Hmm?”  
  
“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name,” Fuuma admitted.   
  
“I suppose it has been,” Yuuko decided absently, and then swept out her arm, inviting him closer. He obeyed her, a moth to the flame. She draped one arm over his shoulder once he was close enough and he was unused to the touch, though he did not react to it. “Tell me your wish. What is your wish?”   
  
“I want to travel dimensions, like my brother,” Fuuma said, without hesitation.   
  
Yuuko’s hand dusted over his shoulder. “Why?”  
  
“Why?” Fuuma parroted.   
  
“Do you do it because you want to follow your brother’s footsteps? What is it that makes you want to leave this world and move through uncertain dimensions?”   
  
Fuuma hesitated, because the thought hadn’t occurred to him. He knew why, of course. He’d lived and breathed this desire for years now, since he could remember. And now someone who could make it possible was looking him straight in the eye and asking him questions he was unaccustomed to answering.   
  
“I want to leave this world.”   
  
Yuuko regarded him, expression serious. “Are you running away from something, or are you searching for something?”   
  
Fuuma stared at her and did not answer.   
  
“You remember the price your brother had to pay, those years ago. In order to travel dimensions.”   
  
“The original price was he had to give away what was most precious to him,” Fuuma whispered.   
  
“That’s right,” Yuuko said, red eyes watching him.  
  
“I’ll give you what’s most precious to me,” Fuuma said quickly. “Please…”  
  
“You cannot,” Yuuko said after a pregnant pause.   
  
Fuuma stiffened. “Why?”  
  
“Something that is so easily given away is not precious at all. You remember how your brother struggled,” the Witch of Wishes whispered softly, her words like daggers into his heart. “The reason why you can say that so easily, however, is because you cannot think of something that is precious to you.”  
  
“I—”  
  
“There is nothing in this world that you believe to be precious. You are a rare creature, Fuuma. You have nothing that is precious to you, and therefore you cannot afford to travel dimensions freely and at will.”   
  
The hope that’d dared to spark in his chest started to die.   
  
“But,” Yuuko murmured. “That is your wish, isn’t it? You want to find something that is precious to you. You want to find a place you belong, something that you can claim as ‘precious.’”   
  
Fuuma swallowed a thick lump in his throat.   
  
“That is a precious treasure that you desire, something that every man and every woman and every living thing wants. We are not meant to be alone, Fuuma. No matter what you may believe, alienation and isolation is the death of many a man.” The hand on his shoulder curled into the fabric of his worn jacket, something he’d stolen two years ago and no longer fit—he was no longer the lanky child he’d once been, he’d grown stronger, with muscles and sinew to propel him through crowds and houses, pawning off treasures of others in search of his own.   
  
She lifted her hand, touched his face a moment. His eyes widened and he stared at her through the glass fragments. She ran her hand against his cheek before dropping it back down to his shoulder.  
  
“You like this, don’t you?”  
  
“Like what?” Fuuma asked innocently.   
  
“To be touched. It lets you know that you are real, that others perceive your existence. Even if it is not a gentle touch, it is still a demonstration of your physical presence.”  
  
“I…” Fuuma began.   
  
“As it stands now, you have nothing precious to you. The thing most ‘precious’ to you is not precious at all, merely something that you value in comparison to an entire existence of indifference. For this reason, you cannot afford to travel freely between dimensions.”   
  
“Then…” Fuuma began cautiously. “Is there a way that I could have a payment like my brother? He had a limited amount of worlds he could travel. Could it be like that for me…?”   
  
“You wish to be like your brother, then,” Yuuko said more than asked. Fuuma, had he been younger, would have cringed at that. As it was, instead, his smile stretched thin across his face.   
  
“I want to travel worlds.”   
  
“It can be arranged,” Yuuko said simply.   
  
“Is that so?”   
  
“Your brother’s most precious thing was the blood given to him by Subaru. With that price, he would have lost the powers that blood gave him. As such, the compromise took only some of his powers and magic in exchange for the ability to travel only to some worlds. Likewise, for your payment, should you choose to give it, will be to give me something important to you and in exchange gain access to new worlds.”   
  
“And…?”  
  
Yuuko was silent, as if waiting for something. Fuuma did not back down, just continued to stare at her, tried to show her, without words, how much he wanted this, how much it was the only thing he’d ever wanted.   
  
“You will do something akin to paying off in installments. You will be in my debt, thus sacrificing your complete self-reliance, something important to you. I will choose the worlds that you go to, as you will go there in my name for the sake of retrieving treasures I need or holding them for others, thus sacrificing your independence and ability to choose your own destinations. You will be my employee, my treasure hunter. You will be able to travel, but only where I have you go. Your payment is your vulnerability—you would be at my mercy, Fuuma.”   
  
“Aren’t I at your mercy, now?” Fuuma asked, without truly asking. “It’s because of you that any of this is possible, after all.”   
  
“That is my price. Whether it is worth it to you is your own decision. It is your choice.”   
  
“So… I would not be ‘free’,” Fuuma said at last, after a long moment of thinking. He tilted his head back and looked at the sky, and today it did not seem as far away as it’d once had. He exhaled, slowly. “Would I ever return to this world?”   
  
“Perhaps,” Yuuko said calmly. “One can never know for sure, what will become of the future.”   
  
“Hmhm…”  
  
“So. What is your choice?”   
  
“Choice… huh?” Fuuma whispered. He closed his eyes again and laughed, low in his throat. “Let’s see if there’s something out there that can be ‘precious’ to me.”   
  
Yuuko smiled. “So it is, then.”   
  
“And so it shall be,” Fuuma agreed, laughing again.   
  
Yuuko inclined her head towards her side and he strolled over to her. The sky broke again, shifted, and dropped down to swallow them, taking Fuuma away from the only world he’d ever known—and he was not sad to see it go.   
  
His heart soared.


	6. Become the Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fuuma travels.

“Welcome home!”   
  
“Welcome home!”   
  
Two voices spoke at once and Fuuma blinked his eyes, standing in the doorway of a home. Yuuko strode confidently forward, moving to catch two children who flung themselves at her, blue and pink hair tied back and brushing loose as they flopped into her waiting arms.  
  
“Mistress, welcome back!” one said.   
  
“Welcome back, welcome back!” the other chirped.   
  
Fuuma stood in the foyer, unsure what to make of this situation. The three of them had their moment and eventually the witch straightened and the two children peeked around her, peering towards Fuuma.  
  
“A customer?” they both asked in unison.   
  
“This is Fuuma,” Yuuko said kindly, smiling back at the young man. “He’s a new employee.”   
  
“Employee!” the two crowed and started skipping towards him. Before Fuuma could determine what, exactly, was happening, the two had flung themselves at him, each grabbing one of his hands with both of theirs, tugging him down so that he lurched forward, slumping so that he was more or less at eye level with them.   
  
“I’m Maru!” one told him while other said, “I’m Moro!”   
  
“I’m Fuuma,” Fuuma told them, momentarily forgetting that he’d already been introduced.   
  
“Nice to meet you!” the two sang in unison. “Come on, come on!”   
  
“Take off your shoes,” one instructed and Fuuma toed off the old pieces of leather that’d served as shoes for him over the past five years.   
  
“Come this way,” the other one said, and together the two children pulled him off into the house. Yuuko slid a door open and disappeared behind it but the two girls didn’t follow after her. Instead, they led him down the hallway and proceeded to give him a tour of their home.  
  
He didn’t let go of their hands, even when their grip on him slackened. The vigorous tour soon became a meander throughout the different rooms (some rooms he wasn’t allowed to go into, though) and Fuuma grew more at ease with this strange place he’d arrived to.   
  
They continued on in such a manner until Yuuko emerged into the hallway once again, wearing a new outfit.   
  
“Come with me,” she told Fuuma and with a small goodbye to Maru and Moro, Fuuma released their hands and followed after Yuuko.  
  
She led him through the house again, towards a room towards the back, a storage room. Fuuma stood awkwardly in the doorway as Yuuko strode behind large artifacts and stored items. Peering at two jars of what looked like sleeping stuffed animals, Fuuma didn’t realize Yuuko was standing beside him, holding a bundle of clothing.   
  
“Take these,” she instructed and he obediently held out his hands for the clothing. “They’ll fit you. You won’t be needing those rags anymore.”   
  
Fuuma glanced down at his clothing and couldn’t really begrudge Yuuko wanting him to change clothes. The thin fabric he was wearing was dirty, ripped, and clearly ragged. He was clearly a homeless person in these clothes. He looked around for a place to change and realized that Yuuko didn’t really intend for him to leave.   
  
“… Um,” Fuuma began politely. “I don’t suppose you have a pair of gloves, do you?”   
  
“Cold?” Yuuko asked in a way that Fuuma knew wasn’t really a question. If anyone were to know his reasons, be able to read him so clearly, it would be Yuuko.   
  
Even if both of them knew he was lying, however, it didn’t stop Fuuma from smiling and saying, “Yes.”  
  
Yuuko gave him a pair of gloves, and a knapsack. “You’ll need it,” she told him before he could ask, “for your travels.”   
  
“I take it I won’t be staying here long, then,” Fuuma said cheerfully as he set the clothes down on a chair and shrugged off his jacket. It crumpled at his feet and he glanced at Yuuko a moment before removing his gloves. He stared idly at the old scars on his hands a moment before pulling on the new gloves, immediately conforming to his skin snuggly.   
  
“No,” Yuuko agreed. “You have a lot of work ahead of you. And besides, it isn’t your wish to stay in one place, is it?”   
  
“Not really,” Fuuma agreed, pulling off the layers on his chest. “But I don’t even get a bath?”   
  
Yuuko chuckled and came over to him, holding out a chain with a compass attached to it. Fuuma stretched out his hand and took it from her, peering down at it. He moved it around, inspected it in his hand, and glanced up at her.  
  
“It’s broken,” he told her. “The needle isn’t working.”   
  
“What you hold in your hand is your means for traveling dimensions,” Yuuko said pleasantly and turned on her heel to march back into the shadows of the storage room. He heard her shuffling around—or as much as someone like her could _shuffle_ , of all things—and he turned his attention back down towards the compass, inspecting it with a new light. Yuuko’s voice called out from the back of the room, “It’ll guide you to where you need to go, though. Where I instruct you to go, at least. It’s supplied with magic that will let you pass through.”   
  
“And if the needle doesn’t work, how am I meant to know where to go?”  
  
“It points to where you need to go,” Yuuko said as she walked up to him, and then past him. Fuuma watched the arrow swivel around to follow after the witch. He looked up at her and she was smiling at him, holding out a rounded, oblong container. He took it from her and put it in his bag. Yuuko continued, “There will be times when in worlds we will not be able to contact one another. This will let you know what you’ll need to do. In most instances I’ll be able to communicate with you through the compass. It’ll let me inform you of your deliveries and pick-ups.”  
  
“Of course,” Fuuma agreed and slung it over his head so that the compass rested against his chest. He pulled on the shirt waiting for him from the bundle of clothing she’d given to him.   
  
As Fuuma dressed, Yuuko kept giving him things to put into his bag, and filled him in on his assignments—where he would go, what he would do, and mostly how to travel and contact her, should the need arise. Fuuma listened attentively, and though somewhere in his heart was the remaining jealousy of being unable to move freely, to be so completely at Yuuko’s whims, it was quickly overpowered by the encompassing feeling of freedom and fulfillment. Even if it wasn’t exactly as he’d wanted, his wish was still granted.   
  
Once he was dressed, and Yuuko had given him everything he needed, he stood out in the hall, collecting his thoughts before setting out on the journey laid out for him. He stared down at the compass for a moment and then looked to the side, at a mirror propped up against the wall.  
  
Fuuma stared at it a long moment, seeing himself for the first time in years. He’d caught his reflection before—in store windows, in puddles and ponds—but he’d never stopped to study it. An older face stared back at him, guarded eyes and a thin smile that looked genuine, all things considered. He knew it was fake, but he could see how others over the years had been fooled by it.   
  
He didn’t turn away in disgust from the reflection. He studied it, the way his eyes were distant, guarded, and how it must be impossible to tell of his delayed vision from those years ago. The clothes looked normal on him, as if they’d been made for him. They were a thousand times more comfortable than the clothing of his world—looser, softer. The straps and… “zippers” (that’s what Yuuko had called them) were more interesting than the buttons of his world had been.   
  
Were all worlds like this one, he wondered. It was with as stirring of excitement he refused to acknowledge on his face that he realized that he would soon find out.   
  
He could handle being at Yuuko’s whim, he realized, if it meant he was able to do this.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He traveled for years, doing as Yuuko bided. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought it would be. Some worlds he would only spend a few days, other times a few weeks. Once or twice he spent a few months, doing as Yuuko saw fit. They communicated when they could—usually at t he expense of other magic users, Yuuko’s customers, charging up the compass for him. It wasn’t bad at all, all things considered. He got to move when he wanted, do what he wanted between jobs and between traveling.   
  
He wasn’t well acquainted with the feeling of contentment, but he figured that out of everything he’d experienced in his life, this was the closest he would get to happiness.   
  
But despite that, he never felt sad when he left a world, or left people behind. He was never there long enough to grow attached, to find someone or someplace or something that would make him want to stay.   
  
He worked for Yuuko in order to pay for the wish—his wish to find something precious.   
  
And he would keep searching for that. As long as it took.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Oh,” a voice said softly behind him. Fuuma knew that voice instantly.   
  
It wasn’t surprise, merely an exhalation of breath. And when he turned around, there was no shock on his brother’s face. Seishirou looked exactly as he had the day he’d left Fuuma behind, and smiled absently.   
  
Fuuma smiled, too, a practiced, schooled expression. “Hello.”  
  
“You’re older,” Seishirou observed.  
  
“And you look just the same,” Fuuma said pleasantly. “It’s good to see you again, Brother.”   
  
“Is it?” his brother asked and it wasn’t really much of a question.   
  
Fuuma shrugged. “Who knows?”   
  
“It’s been a while,” Seishirou continued.   
  
The younger of the two brothers, now taller than the eldest, shrugged again. “Has it been a long time for you? You look just the same.”   
  
Seishirou moved so that he was standing at the edge of the roof they stood on, looking down at the people below. This world was eerily similar to the one they’d once lived in, so it was only appropriate that they should meet again—at least, Fuuma liked to think so. He liked to notice things like this, that would be unnecessary or pointless to everyone else.   
  
His brother was silent a long moment before saying, “It’s hard to tell how long time passes when the time tables are different in every world.”   
  
“That’s true,” Fuuma agreed. He couldn’t know for sure how long he’d been traveling with Yuuko, as the times were different in every world. He had no idea how long he’d been gone from their home world. “At the very least, back home, you’d been gone for ten years.”  
  
“And now you’re traveling, too,” Seishirou concluded.   
  
“So it would seem,” Fuuma stated cheerfully, smiling inanely out at the horizon, hands in his pockets. His scarred hands, covered in gloves, curled idly into fists before loosening, slack, in the pockets.   
  
“Through the witch?”   
  
“More like for Miss Yuuko,” Fuuma agreed with a sigh that was only slightly dramatic. “I’ve become something of an errand boy for her.”   
  
When he turned to look at his brother, Seishirou was scanning the horizon, before he, too, turned his attention up at his brother. He looked amused a moment, as a thought struck him. Fuuma knew better than to ask him about it and let it be.   
  
“Is that so?” Seishirou asked without really asking.   
  
Fuuma shrugged again, chuckling. “I go where she tells me to.”   
  
“And that’s satisfactory for you, is it? Worth paying the price?”   
  
Fuuma’s eyes flickered and he had to look away. He pulled the hands from his pockets so he could cross his arms over his chest. He hoped it didn’t look as defensive as he felt.   
  
“It is.”   
  
“Hmmm,” Seishirou hummed and it wasn’t agreement or disagreement.   
  
“Have you found them yet?” Fuuma asked after a pause.   
  
Seishirou’s smile shifted, almost turned wistful. “No.”   
  
“Hmmm.” It was Fuuma’s turn to betray nothing as he hummed absently, peering out over this world.   
  
They stood in silence.  
  
“It’s you,” Fuuma finally said. “It’s only a matter of time before you do.”   
  
Seishirou chuckled. “Even now, you have such unrelenting faith in things.”   
  
Fuuma laughed, too. “It’s not like that.”   
  
“Of course,” Seishirou murmured. “My mistake to think I could know you, after all these years have passed.”   
  
“I just meant that it isn’t like my brother to give up, is all,” Fuuma offered.   
  
“You’re taller,” Seishirou said in return. “It’s strange having to look up at you.”   
  
“It’s weird looking down,” Fuuma agreed, thankful for the sudden change in subject. He laughed. “Who would have thought living on the streets would make someone grow up so fast?”   
  
Seishirou smiled. “Who indeed.”   
  
They stood in silence for the rest of the night, until the stars came out. Fuuma watched them idly, watched the way they shifted and warped as Seishirou left to the next world, and he stayed behind on a few moments before setting out as well.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
The years passed slowly. He found nothing precious.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
He didn’t run into anyone he knew after that, not after his brother. The faces blurred away into nothingness, and he knew it was the same for him to everyone else. There was no one to remember him, and it was to be expected.   
  
Who would remember or miss someone like him, after all? He wasn’t anyone of importance.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
When Fuuma landed in the new world properly equipped, bag slung over his shoulder and rose-tinted glasses poised on the bridge of his nose, he released the tiniest of sighs. Yuuko had warned him about his priorities in this world, to lie low and wait. She also warned him that they would be incommunicado for a while. And when Yuuko said a while, Fuuma suspected it’d be a long while without being babysat by the witch. This was fine with him.   
  
So he strolled confidently across the desolate landscape, following the compass needle pointing towards his next assignment. He hummed to himself as through the rubble and wasteland rose a tower.   
  
“Ah,” he said to himself, and continued humming. His footsteps added the beat and soon he’d quite forgotten the worlds he’d already visited and focused solely on this wasteland he’d get to call home for a few years. He smiled cheerfully to no one, but his eyes didn’t stray away from the tower that pierced the horizon a few miles in front of him.   
  
As soon as he was within sight of the tower, he could see the bleak faces and the wild eyes staring at him. And he was also kind of painfully aware of six guns pointed directly at him. He smiled politely, and waved a bit at the figures holding the guns.   
  
“Good morning,” Fuuma greeted and then laughed, “Or perhaps it’s evening. I can’t be sure, as I don’t know which way is west.”   
  
“You have a compass,” one of the figures with guns pointed out.   
  
Fuuma snapped the lid shut over his compass and tucked it back underneath his shirt. “It’s broken.”   
  
“Then why use it?”   
  
“Hmm, I wonder,” Fuuma said cheerfully, smile not once flickering, even as one figure took a step closer, aiming the barrel of the gun at his chest. He waved his hands a bit dismissively. “Now, now, there’s no need for hostility.”   
  
“What are you doing here? Who are you?” the closest figure snapped, his voice deep but strained.   
  
“Oh, no one of importance,” Fuuma chirped before kicking his foot up and knocking the gun out of the young man’s hand effortlessly. He grabbed it before it could hit the ground, twisted his arm behind his back, twisting him around, and pressed his boot into the small of his back, forcing him to his knees. The other five were startled, shouting out his name (Daisuke, Fuuma noted), poising their guns at his head in order to avoid hitting their companion. Fuuma waved his gun a bit, making sure it was cocked and the barrel was aimed almost laughably close to his captive’s head. Fuuma continued in his same old cheerful tone, painted smile unwavering, “My name is Fuuma, and I’d like to join this little ragtag group you’ve got going here.”   
  
“Why should we trust you?”   
  
“Why should you trust anyone?” Fuuma said with a shrug, still smiling.   
  
The girl who spoke paused, and she shifted a bit. One of her companions, a man with a kind smile and glasses, placed a hand on her shoulder to pacify her and she looked up at him.   
  
Fuuma continued. “I’ve only just arrived in this world. I’m from a place very far away.”   
  
“Don’t let him,” snapped the young man in his grip. “He can’t be trusted.”  
  
“There are few people in this world or any world who can be,” Fuuma agreed, tugging his arm a bit, threatening it to snap. “But at least I’m honest about my dishonesty.” He smiled cheerfully. “Besides, I can make it worth your time.”   
  
One of the taller figures took a step forward and dusted back her hood, revealing a curly wave of pink hair. In that moment, Fuuma almost froze, almost forgot everything at the shock of seeing her again. But she wasn’t the same, she couldn’t be. He didn’t let his expression waver once, even as his eyes watched her carefully. She stood with one hip jutted out, smiling serenely at him. She still had her gun aimed at him, but in the sort of haphazard way. She didn’t want to shoot, he realized.   
  
“Alright, Fuuma-san,” the woman said, smile curling her lips in a way Fuuma had never smiled. “Why exactly do you want to help us?”  
  
“Because if I don’t have your help, I’ll be dead, won’t I?”   
  
“True,” she agreed.  
  
“And if you give me protection and a place to stay, I’ll give you something that will protect the feather you have in your command,” he said, remembering what Yuuko had told him.  
  
The result of his words was instantaneous. All six stiffened up immediately, and even this world’s Karen couldn’t hide the shock on her face. The young girl from before gasped loudly.  
  
“How—!” the boy in his hold—Daisuke—gasped out. “How could you know about the feather?”   
  
“It’s what’s keeping this tower from falling apart, isn’t it?” Fuuma continued, ignoring their question and smiling ruefully. He nodded his head towards the bag slung over his back. “I have a container in here that will protect the feather from any harm. I’ll give it to you in exchange for staying here.”   
  
The six exchanged glances and Daisuke was still stiff under his hold, glaring at the ground because he could not swivel his head far enough to glare at Fuuma.   
  
Fuuma smiled at them.   
  
“It’s your choice. If not, I can go to wherever there is other shelter.”   
  
“Wait,” the man with glasses said and the others turned o look at him in surprise. “You don’t have to go.”  
  
“Aoki-san,” Karen began—Fuuma watched her the most, committed her to memory and realized that she was already as he remembered—she took a step towards him. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”  
  
“By all means, think it over. I have all day,” Fuuma told them, pressing his foot back into Daisuke’s back when the boy shifted to stand up. The boy in his hold sputtered angrily.   
  
“First, let go of Daisuke-san!” the girl said, face set in determination as she pointed her gun at Fuuma’s head. He wondered if she would actually shoot it—if she yet knew what it felt like to kill someone.   
  
He let him go and the he scrambled away, without his gun, back to the safer side, surrounded by his fighting companions. Now he had no shield, but he knew that none of them would shoot. None of them had the proper look of murderers.   
  
He set down his bag and made a big show of using his free hand to pull out the container, showing to them that it was not a weapon or a means to destroy any of them. They still stayed on guard.   
  
“It’s magic,” he told them, “Does this world have magic?”   
  
“Yes,” another figure said, a woman, and wisps of black hair fell out from under the hood. “Magic exists in this world.”   
  
“I suppose it would, if you know what the feather does for your home here,” Fuuma mused to himself. He smiled, presenting the container Yuuko had given him so many years ago in his shop. “It’ll conceal the feather, make it so that anyone with the ability to sense magic won’t be able to find it. It’ll be hidden, and protected. This container cannot be destroyed.”   
  
The six shifted and Fuuma knew they would accept his proposal. He knew the moment they found him that they would—they needed help, and most of all, they needed someone to follow behind.  
  
He wasn’t much of a leader, but he was something.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
The first few days were the worst. They’d accepted him into their group but he was still very much an outsider.   
  
He protected their feather and after that they didn’t say much to him. This was fine with him—he’d been traveling for years (he couldn’t know for sure how long now, but at least five years) and he’d grown used to solitude. Even before traveling, he was used to solitude. His entire life revolved around introspection and silence.   
  
He wasn’t sure for how long he had to stay here, but he would wait for as long as he needed to. He sat on the outskirts of the tower, looking up at the Tokyo night. It was his favorite thing about the different worlds—how much the stars were different.   
  
There was a standard amount of people staying in the tower. Not a lot, but enough. A small village, at most. They looked out for each other, and they shunned him, the outsider. This was fine. It didn’t matter, so long as he didn’t have to stay out there at night—he hadn’t been burned yet and he didn’t plan to. They’d given him a jacket to wear, with the tower’s insignia on it.   
  
“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” someone said behind him, abruptly.   
  
Fuuma turned his head, looking up at the one who had spoken. It was the young girl from before. She sat down beside him, smiling at him.   
  
“Is that so?” Fuuma asked her. He scraped his mind for the name and said, “Yuzuriha?”   
  
“Mhm,” she said cheerfully, smiling. “Daisuke-san is angry but anyone would have acted like you did in the situation. You just wanted a place to stay.”   
  
“I did,” Fuuma agreed.   
  
“And you’re helping us,” Yuzuriha continued. “Arashi-san—she’s that one,” Yuzuriha supplied, pointing towards the long-haired girl from before, “She saw you coming, in a dream.”   
  
“Hmm,” Fuuma hummed absently.   
  
“So I think it’s okay,” Yuzuriha determined.   
  
“Thank you, then,” Fuuma said with a laugh.   
  
“She saw someone else coming, too,” Yuzuriha said, and then shrugged, “From another world. But that person isn’t going to come here. That person will go to another territory.”   
  
“I see,” Fuuma said politely, only half listening now. “Does it not concern us, then?”  
  
“Sometimes it does,” Yuzuriha said absently. “Sometimes other territories will come to try and steal supplies or water. Water is the most important—there aren’t a lot of places with water left that isn’t contaminated by the rain.” Yuzuriha looked thoughtful. “We have water here, though. But… not a lot. I don’t know how long it’ll last for.”   
  
“So soon you’ll start stealing from others,” Fuuma said absently.   
  
“Yeah,” Yuzuriha murmured, looking regretful. “I don’t like stealing but… I also don’t want people to die. If we run out of water…”   
  
“Sometimes death can’t be helped,” Fuuma murmured to himself and when Yuzuriha tilted her head, trying to hear him, he said, louder, “Hopefully you’ll be able to last a little longer with the water you have.”   
  
“Yeah,” Yuzuriha agreed, smiling.   
  
“And hopefully no one will come to steal ours,” a third voice said and Yuzuriha and Fuuma turned to see Karen standing over them, smiling. “May I join you?”   
  
Fuuma glanced over towards the interior of the tower, where Daisuke and Arashi were watching them like hawks, one looking rather annoyed and the other simply curious. Fuuma turned back to Karen—a face he could never forget—and nodded his head. She smiled and sat down next to Yuzuriha.   
  
“You’re injured,” Fuuma said, watching the way Karen nursed her arm.   
  
“Oh, from hunting,” Karen dismissed. “It’s only a scratch. We don’t have a lot of supplies here so—”  
  
Fuuma dug around into his bag and presented her with a first aid kit. She blinked at in surprise and refused to take it. Fuuma jiggled it at her.   
  
“You don’t need to use it, but for the future. You two keep going on about supplies, so it’ll be troublesome if you find out I have this later on and get angry for not sharing,” Fuuma said with a laugh and dropped it into her lap.   
  
The two girls exchanged glances before turning back towards Fuuma. Fuuma was watching the stars.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Eventually even Daisuke warmed up to him.   
  
Eventually they started to see him as a leader. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but it was too late now.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
One day, while playing idly with his compass, Fuuma watched the needle swivel. Before, it’d pointed directly at where the feather sat, deep inside the tower. Now, it quivered and spun around rapidly until it settled somewhere in the distance, away from anywhere the tower people had gone before. Fuuma watched the needle a moment, tapped on the compass to make sure it wasn’t broken, before closing it tightly with a snap and turning towards Sorata, who was working on one of the motorized scooters with the tools Fuuma had collected a few worlds back and coincidentally had in his bag with him.   
  
“What’s out there?” he asked Sorata, and pointed to indicated where he meant when Sorata looked up.   
  
Sorata wiped his brow and grinned his dopey, lopsided grin. “Don’t know too well. We usually avoid that place during hunting, since it’s another territory.”   
  
“Ah,” Fuuma said, mostly to himself, and turned his attention back towards the wasteland. It was hard enough to see anything distinct in his strange Tokyo, but the shards in his eyes made it impossible for him to see too far out, only haphazard shapes he realized were probably only rain clouds.   
  
Sorata went back to work on the bike and the two remained in silence.  
  
After about an hour, Fuuma asked him, “Bike done, yet?”   
  
“Just finished,” Sorata announced triumphantly, “But—”  
  
“Great, I’ll take it for a test run,” Fuuma said and jumped down from the slab of concrete he’d been sitting on, striding over and getting onto the bike.   
  
Sorata laughed. “Well, if you insist.”   
  
“I do,” Fuuma said with a laugh. “I’ll be back.”  
  
“Be careful?” Sorata asked and watched Fuuma scoot away on the bike. He crossed his arms and laughed. “Well, then.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Fuuma moved in the direction the compass told him, too. The wind pushed back his hood but it was okay because there was no rain, and he moved through enough rubble to make it hard for any monsters to get to him. He’d spent enough time in Tokyo to know the rules now.   
  
Presently, a building loomed in the horizon and he slowed the bike down, so it wouldn’t make a sound. He didn’t get too close, watched the people moving along the outside of the this building.   
  
He watched them as best he could, sensed for them and watched their movements. They wore long robes, covering their entire bodies. Six following one as he moved around. Fuuma watched them, captivated, as the leader of these seven hooded figures paused, looking out at the horizon, before turning and disappearing into the darkness of the building.   
  
Fuuma did not stay long. He quickly returned to the tower.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“What do you know about the building in the distance to the north?” Fuuma asked Aoki and Karen a few days later.   
  
The two adults looked up at him a moment before Karen turned to Aoki, eyebrows raised.   
  
“Been exploring, Fuuma-kun?” Aoki asked with a smile.   
  
“Yes,” Fuuma said with a shrug. “I was making sure the bike Sorata-san fixed wasn’t broken.”   
  
“I see,” Aoki said and thought this over. “I don’t know much… that’s where another cluster of people stay, at least. I don’t know how many, but they must have water. And their building isn’t hurt by the rain, like our tower.”   
  
“They probably have a feather,” Fuuma mused and then nodded his head for Aoki to continue. “What of their leader?”   
  
“They don’t have one, if I remember correctly,” Aoki mused at loud. “It’s been a long time since we crossed paths with them. A while ago they came to take some of our medical supplies, but they were disordered and didn’t managed. There was no one to lead them.”   
  
“Hmm,” Fuuma mused.   
  
“Why?”  
  
“I didn’t get a good look, but it just seemed as if there was a group of people being lead by one back into the building. I just figured it was the leader, but I could be mistaken.”   
  
“Ah,” Karen agreed. “It’s possible they could have a leader now, or at least be better organized. It has been a while since we last saw them, after all. It was just before you came here, actually.”   
  
“Shall we go check it out?” Fuuma asked pleasantly.   
  
Aoki and Karen exchanged glances.  
  
Fuuma shrugged. “It’s always good to get water, isn’t it?”   
  
“Is it really water you’re after or do you just want to assess the situation?” Karen asked, but didn’t sound as if she disapproved. She shook her head. “You’re right, it’s always good to keep tabs on what’s going on around us, isn’t it?”   
  
“If we’re careful,” Aoki reminded and Karen gave him the softest of smiles. He smiled back at her, looking a bit befuddled a moment.   
  
Fuuma had to look away, under the pretense of searching through his bag. He never handled affection very well, especially when it was with Karen, someone too close to his past, even if she herself was and always would be unaware of it.   
  
“Get the others, then,” Fuuma said.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
They traveled together and this time approached the government building head-on. Fuuma didn’t bother to lurk and they dismounted their bikes, looking around the broken tiled floors and the bodies of the dead enemies left to rot and decay.   
  
“Oh,” Fuuma said, amused, as he dodged an arrow before it could pierce his thigh. He laughed. “Well, that was certainly close.”   
  
The others behind him were on guard instantly and he scanned around, seeing nothing in the shadows. Then he heard the twang of another arrow being released and quickly shoved Daisuke out of the way.   
  
“They’re over there,” Fuuma determined and pointed towards their left.   
  
There was a still silence, and then the rush of feet as six figures emerged from the darkness, shooting arrows from crossbows at them. Fuuma, used to such things throughout his life, easily dodged and shoved aside his companions when necessary. They retreated behind some rubble.   
  
“Distract them, I’ll sneak inside,” Fuuma told Sorata, who was nearest to him.   
  
“Will you be okay?” Sorata asked, peeking over the rubble towards the six figures.   
  
“Of course. There’s seven of us and only six of them,” Fuuma laughed. “I’ll just go and find whoever’s hiding.”   
  
“One of them is only a child,” Karen said and she sounded saddened by this fact.   
  
Fuuma glanced at his teammates before slinking away into the rubble, curling around where the figures were waiting—how untrained they must be, if they cannot hear him—and slunk away into the shadows of the building. It was to be expected, though. His entire life had revolved around silence, so if they’d heard him he’d be rather impressed.   
  
He curled his way through the building, searching for stairs that weren’t destroyed or a way to get to wherever it is he was meant to go. He checked his compass, and followed the needle as it swiveled and pointed.   
  
He found a long set of stairs leading downward. Checking around to make sure no one could see him or hear him—he could hear the scuffle from the outside but trusted his teammates not to get themselves killed—and descended the stairs.   
  
The hunter moved quietly, in case there was someone waiting, and he closed his compass with a snap when he realized he was in an underground reservoir. Columns descended upwards into a ceiling he could not see and the water stretched on throughout the building, clear and pure. The compass must mean for this.   
  
There was enough water here to help the small group of people living in the tower, who everyday ran more and more towards lack of water.   
  
He took a step forward and then heard a hiss that made him freeze. Standing near the reservoir was someone he hadn’t seen at first—and recognized instantly as the one the other six had been following before. He wore his red covering but the stance and height was just the same. The only light in this place was an ethereal glow from the water—undoubtedly there must be a feather, then—and Fuuma could not make out the face from this seventh building member.   
  
“Who are you?” he hissed—so it was a man who stood before him. He sounded young, though.   
  
Fuuma kept his own hood up—might as well play fair, right?   
  
He chuckled. “No one of importance.”   
  
“How did you get here?” the hooded figure hissed.   
  
“I walked down the stairs,” Fuuma joked, but realized that his humor would be lost on this angry person.   
  
True enough, he watched the figure stiffen, and launch towards him. He didn’t have a crossbow with him, but Fuuma had his gun. He pointed it at the approaching figure but he dodged the bullet quickly—which was just as well as Fuuma was not aiming to hit him and meant it only as a warning. Fuuma dodged as the other nearly crashed into him. The red figure’s foot collided with the stone, and perhaps it was just Fuuma’s imagination that the marble splintered under the hit.   
  
“Get out of here,” the figure commanded, launching towards Fuuma again.  
  
What followed was the two of them dodging around each other, neither getting near enough to connect a hit and Fuuma momentarily forgetting his gun to merely enjoy the thrill of dodging. It’d been a long time since he’d had to fight with someone, and fight someone who was on par with him, either. Pacifism was so dull. Or, at least that’s what he told himself.   
  
“I’m here to steal the water, so I can’t leave without some of it,” Fuuma told him cheerfully.  
  
“You’ll never get anywhere near here again. I’ll make sure of that.”  
  
“That’s quite the threat.”  
  
There was a soft growl, low and primal. “Don’t make me kill you.”  
  
“Frankly? I’d like to see you try,” Fuuma said as he ducked a kick to the head.   
  
He lurched up, grabbing the other man’s wrists and throwing him with all his force against the wall, pinning him there. The other gasped out, a brief exhale at the shock of being caught, before he kneed Fuuma in the gut. The hunter stumbled backwards and it was enough for the other to push off the wall and tackle against Fuuma, knocking him to the floor. The other’s hood fell off, collecting at his shoulders and for the first time Fuuma laid eyes on the angriest face he’d ever seen.   
  
It was disarming, to see such open contempt and hatred—it wasn’t something he’d ever experienced before.   
  
The hand was around his throat before he was even aware of it, but he did not snap it, merely pressed against his air pipe so that he could not breathe. Fuuma struggled, one hand grasping the other’s wrist while the other reached up to press the barrel of his gun against the underside of this man’s chin.   
  
He glared at him, blue eyes furious and intense, black hair spilling over his forehead, face contorted into open hatred.   
  
Fuuma managed to chuckle and it only made the grip around his throat tighten so that he couldn’t breathe again.   
  
“Why the hell are you _laughing?_ ” he hissed.  
  
Fuuma couldn’t answer with the hand around his neck, and the other seemed to realize this because his hold slackened, though he stayed very much on guard.   
  
“Answer me.”   
  
“I was caught,” Fuuma laughed. “It’s been a long time since I was caught.”   
  
“Don’t think so highly of yourself. You’re slow.”   
  
“Am I?”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“Oh dear, I’ll have to work on that,” Fuuma decided and laughed until the other cut off his air supply again. “You’re…” Fuuma began, struggling to speak as the leader of the building choked him, “… you’re awfully… angry…”  
  
“What’s it to you? You won’t get the water.”   
  
Fuuma laughed again.   
  
The laughter seemed to be the direct reason for this person’s anger because he growled low in his throat again and used both hands to choke Fuuma’s neck. This was getting to be a bit much, Fuuma realized—and what a horrible way to die, by someone he didn’t even know (or, really, to die at all would be rather inconvenient, Fuuma amended). He shifted, cocking his gun against the underside of a chin and shifting his foot to kick suddenly into the stomach of his captor.   
  
The man rolled away, grunting and releasing his throat. Fuuma was on his feet quickly, pressing against his chest and aiming his gun at his head. He stayed very still, glaring at him, as if daring him to pull the trigger.   
  
Fuuma watched him, eyes burning with the intensity of a fight he hadn’t realized he was taking seriously. They watched each other, silently, until the one beneath him grasped his leg and pulled with all his might, sending Fuuma into the wall. They both quickly jumped to their feet.  
  
“Do I get a name?”   
  
“No.”  
  
“I suppose I haven’t introduced myself, either.”   
  
“I have no intention of knowing you.”  
  
“Of course.” Fuuma brushed off his shoulder, but kept his eyes on his opponent, in case he darted forward again. But it seemed his enemy was intent on keeping his distance, and keeping himself between Fuuma and the water. Fuuma chuckled again, not from amusement but only because it agitated this person, “So angry.”   
  
“You keep saying that as if you’re surprised,” the other hissed.   
  
“I’m not used to it.”  
  
“Being hated?” the other scoffed. “I find that very hard to believe.”  
  
“You’d be surprised,” Fuuma told him— _surprised by how there’s very little to feel at all._ Having someone feel something towards him, even if it was hatred, was refreshing. “You still haven’t said your name.”  
  
“For good reason.”   
  
“Ah, too bad.”   
  
The man dove for him again, and as Fuuma backed up away from him he realized the systematic approach to get him away by backing him up the staircase and back to the daylight—away from the water.   
  
“Clever,” Fuuma told him but made no move to try and descend the stairs again.  
  
It seemed his opponent was done talking, because once they reached the surface again, he merely shoved Fuuma away back towards his teammates, who were busy fighting against their opponents, now out of arrows.   
  
Fuuma spoke to his teammates even as his eyes did not turn away from the leader. “I’ve found the water. We can regroup for now.”   
  
  
\---  
  
  
They returned several times after that, always with the intention of stealing the water.   
  
The leader of the diet building (as they learned to call it) never let Fuuma too close to the water, but he got closer every time.   
  
Whenever they arrived there, all seven were waiting for him, as if they knew (Arashi later told him that they most likely had a dreamseer as well).   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“You keep coming back here, but we won’t let you have it,” the leader of the diet building told him.   
  
Fuuma shot at his foot, just to see him jump away—he found it amusing.   
  
“I know that. Which is why we’re going to take it, hm?”   
  
“You won’t make it there.”   
  
“Of course not,” Fuuma told him, cheerful.   
  
The leader dove towards him and Fuuma darted forward to meet him, and they started in their custom—darting and fighting against one another, connecting but never staying together long. Fuuma liked this the most. He’d never been one to fight, never been one to see any value in it. But this person made him want to fight, made him want to stay close to touch and feel and, for the half seconds in which he dared, be possessive.   
  
“You know,” Fuuma said as he ducked beneath a jab from the leader and kicked out at his feet. They both dodged away from one another. “I still don’t know your name.”   
  
“For good reason,” the other growled.   
  
“But you know mine,” Fuuma continued. “You’ve heard my teammates yell out my name—they get so concerned, isn’t that cute?—and yet I still don’t know yours. That’s hardly fair.”  
  
“Nothing in life is fair,” the other growled and kicked at his face.   
  
Fuuma ducked. “Did I strike a nerve? You seem even angrier than usual.”   
  
He smiled at him as the leader bristled and tried to punch at him. He was sloppy, however, and Fuuma was ready for it. He grasped his wrists and twisted them behind his back so that he was pressed up against his back. He could see the way his shoulders stiffened, the way he tensed up and glared down at the ground. He hissed low in this throat and struggled against Fuuma’s hold.   
  
“Get away.”  
  
“Make me.”   
  
“Damn it,” the other cursed.   
  
Fuuma found his anger the most amusing. His favorite part about fighting the leader of the diet building was because of his explosive reactions to things. He was so unaccustomed to someone with such little restraint on his emotions.   
  
He’d grown up in a world where the smiles were meant to be weapons, where they hid everything that could be seen as a vulnerability. He can barely recall times when his mother and brother weren’t smiling, even if the smiles were nothing but empty. In a world where the smiles were used to hide the hatred, the indifference, and the pain… seeing such unbridled hatred left Fuuma wanting more.   
  
What he enjoyed most about him was that he never smiled. That anger, that unrestrained emotion that he didn’t even attempt or see need to hide. It was always direct with this leader, nothing he had to be on the look out for. It simply was. And as much as the diet building’s leader tried to hide what he thought, refused to say a word while they fought—Fuuma could see it. Could see that, underneath all the anger, all the annoyance, all the hatred—all Fuuma could see was undisrupted sadness.   
  
And it was the most amazing thing he’d ever experienced.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Fuuma-san, look out!” he heard Yuzuriha shout but her words were empty, because Fuuma was more than aware of where the arrows were flying and where the leader was.   
  
The leader of the diet building was charging towards him, read to strike him. He dodged in time to hear the whistle of an arrow whizzing past his ear and he smirked as he met the other leader head-on, eyes locking and refusing to budge away.   
  
The leader was pulling him down by the chain of his compass, which had come loose from under the fabric of his shirts. The compass clicked open, the needled swiveled behind Kamui, towards the open doorway he’d emerged from, where the water was waiting. If Yuuko wanted him to get the water so much, he would.   
  
Fuuma kicked at his opponent, and shoved forward, leaving the smaller man behind him. Fuuma caught the compass, yanked it from the other’s hand and moved to close it.   
  
But he stopped as he watched the needle swivel around and point behind him. He turned in time to see a foot coming at his head and he quickly ducked, and shoved up, pushing his shoulder into his enemy’s stomach and sending him tumbling backwards. He rolled on the ground and Fuuma stared in shock as the needle in his compass pointed towards the opponent.   
  
Fuuma clicked the compass shut and dove forward, shoving his opponent up against a slab of concrete. He studied his expression and his enemy glared right back at him, blue eyes smoldering in his hatred.   
  
“Kamui!” someone shouted behind them and Fuuma froze.  
  
He could not hide the brief moment when his eyes widened in shock. Nothing could have possibly prepared him for that moment when he realized that the person he was pressing up against, pinning down—the person he’d fought for weeks—was named Kamui.   
  
Something quivered in his chest, something akin to anticipation and something similar to the old feelings of admiration and disbelief he’d felt when he’d first seen his brother trip through the door bloody and injured.   
  
His thoughts ran a mile a minute—but was it the same Kamui?  
  
His opponent struggled against him, glaring at him and glaring over his shoulder at whoever had betrayed his secret. He hissed low in his throat, arching up against Fuuma and trying to push him away—and it clicked. He’d arrived in this world suddenly—of this, Fuuma was certain—and the growls and hisses and the way he moved with elegance he’d never seen before in another human.   
  
But then, where was Subaru? If this was truly who his brother had been searching for, where was the other twin? Did that explain the sadness in Kamui’s eyes?   
  
“Kamui,” Fuuma said, breathing his name for the first time in a very long time.  
  
His opponent stiffened up, and glared at him once again, grinding his teeth together—and Fuuma could see it, the slight point of fangs. This was the one his brother had been searching for, the one that Fuuma had always wanted to know everything about. And he here he was, pressed up against him, in this wasteland of a world. And the compass was pointing straight at him.   
  
“So your name’s Kamui.”  
  
“What’s it to you?” growled the other, seeing no sense in denying it now. His eyes narrowed and he struggled. “Let go of me, damn it.”   
  
“We’ve finally been introduced,” Fuuma whispered and remembered to smile, even as he felt himself shake to the core.   
  
“Unfortunately.”   
  
And he managed to get free enough in order to crack his fist against the outside of Fuuma’s skull. They fought.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
Fuuma spent the next few days thinking, no matter how much he tried not to.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
They spent years fighting, Kamui always going straight for Fuuma. The others quickly learned to leave their leaders to fight against one another.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
“Are you sure you’ve never met him before this?” Karen asked him one day.  
  
Fuuma hummed in confusion, eyeing her over the rims of his sunglasses. “Come again?”  
  
“It’s just,” she began and laughed a bit, as if she knew how foolish her next words must sound. “The way you look at him, it’s as if you’re old friends, or…”  
  
She trailed off, but her implications were clear.   
  
“Karen-san,” Fuuma laughed. “What an imagination you have!”   
  
“I’m sorry if I’m assuming too much.”  
  
“Maybe a little,” Fuuma admitted with a wide smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “But no. I’ve never met Kamui before this.”   
  
“My mistake, then,” Karen said, pleasantly, and if she noticed the warning tone in Fuuma’s smiling voice, she kept it to herself. “Just the way you interacted had me think…”  
  
“Perhaps you’re reading into it too much,” Fuuma said, voice soft but acidic. Warning.   
  
Karen, though, was one of the people at the Tower who did not fear him, and quite possibly very easily saw through him. Fuuma wasn’t sure if he liked that idea very much, because it reminded him of things that should stay very firmly in the past.   
  
“Perhaps.”   
  
“All we do is fight, in any case,” Fuuma continued, trying to convince her and perhaps himself as well. He sighed. “There really isn’t any opportunity to get to know a person.”  
  
“On the contrary,” Karen pressed, and when Fuuma looked up at her warily, she smiled. “Fighting reveals a lot about a person. It allows you to get close.” And to demonstrate this point, she skated over to his side, arching up against him, though there were no ulterior motives in her movements, only a warm, almost motherly smile—but Fuuma tried hard not to think about mothers, or family in general—and she continued: “It allows you to see more about a person than you could ever think possible. Nuances, thoughts. You can see it in a person’s eyes.” Her smile widened, became almost catlike. “And if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that your eyes and Kamui’s eyes are very expressive when you’re together.”   
  
Fuuma laughed, and curled one arm around Karen, giving her something of a hug but not quite. She seemed content with his unfamiliarity with intimacy, and it was just as well, because she patted his cheek with her hand and took a step back, expression soft.   
  
“Do you fight with your person?” Fuuma asked, and knew this was as close as he was going to get to admitting that he was in love with someone he’d only just met recently, technically, but whom he’d always wanted to meet.   
  
Karen’s expression softened around the edges and her eyes grew infinitely sad.   
  
“No.”   
  
She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to. Fuuma knew who she was referring to.  
  
The next time they went to try to steal water from Kamui, Fuuma made sure that no one could see his eyes behind his lenses.   
  
  
\---  
  
  
It’d been years, but he came into contact with Yuuko again, and gave over the feather. He finally finished what she’d wanted him to do. He had his assignment for the next world.  
  
It was just as well, though. Now that Kamui had been reunited with Subaru, it was only a matter of time before there was nothing left in this world to hold on to.   
  
He said his goodbyes to his teammates, now in the process of moving their small band of humans from the tower to the larger, better supplied diet building—now with enough water to last for generations, or for as long as they weren’t foolish.   
  
Fuuma wasn’t surprised when they were sad to see him go, but accepted it. He was a traveler, and this was not his home.   
  
He asked Kamui where he would go with Subaru, next. It was an empty gesture, for he didn’t expect him to actually tell him.   
  
He was right:   
  
“Like hell I’m going to tell you where we’re going. So you can report it back to that brother of yours.”  
  
Fuuma laughed. “You overestimate my relationship with my brother.”   
  
Kamui glared at him, eyes golden. He had no reason to hide what he was, not anymore.   
  
“You assume that all relationships between siblings are like the one with your brother.” Kamui looked as if he were about to say something but Fuuma cut him off. “Not all brothers would go across worlds and take his brother with him, you know.”  
  
Kamui hissed something that may have been a curse, but Fuuma wasn’t listening to him, only watching his face—that’s how he could come to understand the things the vampire wouldn’t say.   
  
“You’re leaving soon?”  
  
“Subaru is waiting for me,” Kamui growled. “And don’t you dare follow us.”  
  
“Me? Never.” He laughed. “I go where I’m told.”  
  
“And I’m telling you to stay away from me.”  
  
He caught Kamui off guard when he darted forward and wrapped his arms around Kamui, pulling him back and keeping him close. He gripped his wrists as Kamui struggled, growling low in his throat and claws extending slightly in warning. Fuuma ignored the warnings, as he often did.   
  
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Kamui hissed.  
  
Fuuma chuckled, pressing against Kamui’s back and refusing to back away. “No. I don’t want to leave.”   
  
It was with a dim realization that Fuuma came to know that he meant that. It’d been a long time since he’d been honest to anyone, especially himself, but once it was said he couldn’t take it back.   
  
He didn’t want to leave this place.   
  
Kamui growled low in his throat. “I should kill you.”   
  
“Should you?” Fuuma asked without really asking, resting his mouth near Kamui’s ear as he whispered, “So why don’t you?”  
  
Kamui did not answer and his struggles renewed. But Fuuma did not slacken his grip. Kamui growled again, and Fuuma knew his eyes were burning gold in his fury.   
  
Fuuma smiled, ignoring the way something in his chest clenched—that wasn’t something he needed to pay attention to, and wouldn’t. His hold on Kamui was firm.   
  
“I don’t know,” Kamui finally relented, his enraged, not at Fuuma but more possibly at himself. “Damn it.”   
  
Fuuma allowed his smile to soften for half a moment before he steadied it again, smoothed it out to its neutral position. He rested his chin against Kamui’s shoulder and the vampire did not shove him away.   
  
“Then maybe you shouldn’t,” Fuuma offered.   
  
Kamui grumbled something to himself, and it came out as a string of inaudible words.   
  
“What’s that?”  
  
“You’re doing this on purpose,” Kamui said, louder this time.   
  
Fuuma chuckled. “Doing what?”   
  
“Just as soon as I think I’ve figured you out, you go and do and say stupid, pointless things,” Kamui muttered.   
  
“I don’t expect you to figure any of it out,” Fuuma said, honestly. He laughed, peering down at the hands pressing against Kamui’s chest, pulling him close.   
  
“And why’s that?” The agitation was back in the vampire’s voice.   
  
“It’s a secret,” Fuuma told him with a chuckle.   
  
Kamui stiffened out and struggled, trying to force himself from Fuuma’s arms. Fuuma let him go, watched as he dipped away from Fuuma, turned on his heel, his eyes narrowed and his entire body on guard as he glared at Fuuma. The hunter let him, smiled at him, and said nothing.   
  
“I don’t wish to know anything going on in that head of yours.”  
  
“I know,” Fuuma told him.   
  
Kamui growled. “Good.”   
  
“Hmm,” Fuuma hummed low in his throat.  
  
Kamui watched him, on edge and not letting himself get closer to the human. “You stay away from me and Subaru from now on. I cannot allow any kind of connection to _that man_.”  
  
“I know,” Fuuma said again.   
  
“Good,” Kamui repeated and almost seemed kind of agitated and disbelieving of Fuuma’s quick compliance. “We better not meet again.”  
  
“I wonder if we will,” Fuuma said and hated that somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted to say ‘I hope we do’. He hadn’t forgotten what his brother had taught him, though. He couldn’t forget that, and wouldn’t.   
  
Fuuma watched Kamui.  
  
Kamui watched Fuuma.   
  
“If there’s any justice in this universe, we won’t,” Kamui finally decided, looking away.   
  
Fuuma’s smile shifted a moment and he laughed. “There is hardly any justice anywhere.”   
  
“I won’t allow…” Kamui began, and then thought better of it and shook his head. He turned his back on Fuuma and walked away. “Just stay out of our way.”  
  
Fuuma smiled at his back and watched the vampire walk away.   
  
“Will you miss me, Kamui?” Fuuma called out to him.  
  
Kamui stiffened up, stopping abruptly and turning around to glare at him. “What?”   
  
“Will you miss me while we’re apart?” Fuuma asked again, and laughed at his expression. If there was one thing he would miss, it would be agitating him. (He refused to admit he would miss him—he refused, he refused, he refused—)  
  
“Don’t say such stupid things,” Kamui growled. “I certainly won’t miss you. If we never meet again, it’ll be too soon.”   
  
“So harsh!”   
  
“Don’t think I’m going to forget your obnoxious face,” Kamui continued, almost marching back towards Fuuma and restraining himself. His eyes were still gold. “I won’t forget you.”   
  
“Is that so?” Fuuma laughed, raising one eyebrow.   
  
Kamui seemed to realize the magnitude of that statement because he bristled up. He amended, “Just because we meet in another world doesn’t mean I’m going to forget who and what you are! If I ever see you again, I won’t hesitate to get you away.”   
  
“I’ll hold you to that promise,” Fuuma called out to him, grinning. “If you forget me, I’ll be so disappointed.”   
  
“Shut up,” Kamui snapped and whirled around, stomping away to find his brother and leave this world, in his own privacy and away from this hunter. He muttered to himself as he stomped away, soft enough that Fuuma couldn’t hear, “As if I could forget this nightmare…”   
  
Fuuma watched him go, smiling fondly.   
  
Once he was certain he was gone, the hunter laughed to himself, staring up at the sky, where the stars were breaking through the remnants of acid rain clouds. He stayed like that a long moment, trying to reassess and squash the feelings quivering in his chest, things he didn’t want to acknowledge or investigate, and yet could not ignore.   
  
“I want us to meet again,” he said finally and laughed. He closed his eyes, nursing the thoughts running turmoil in his head. He laughed again, and this time it sounded less mirthless and more amused, perhaps at his own expense. “Isn’t that foolish?”   
  
He stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet, processing these thoughts.  
  
“I wonder if you really will remember me?”   
  
And then he laughed again. He pulled the compass out from underneath his shirt, stared at it a moment, before twisting the cogs in just the way to summon up the transportation circle. He felt the magic swirling around him, wanted to bust free and find Kamui again and knowing that he and Subaru were already gone from his reach. For the first time in his life, he felt that maybe he understood his brother, even if only a little.   
  
The magic swirled around him, the sky dropped down to collect him and he became one with it, melting into its embrace as he felt his body plucked from Tokyo and careening towards somewhere else entirely.   
  
He closed his eyes, chuckled one last time as the world swallowed him and thought:   
  
_Wish granted._


End file.
